3 September 2014
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
The bizarre creatures were collected from the deep sea in 1986 during a research cruise off Tasmania
A mushroom-shaped sea animal discovered off the Australian coast has defied classification in the tree of life.
A team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen says the tiny organism does not fit into any of the known subdivisions of the animal kingdom.
Such a situation has occurred only a handful of times in the last 100 years.
The organisms, which were originally collected in 1986, are described in the academic journal Plos One.
The authors of the article note several similarities with the bizarre and enigmatic soft-bodied life forms that lived between 635 and 540 million years ago - the span of Earth history known as the Ediacaran Period.
These organisms, too, have proven difficult to categorise and some researchers have even suggested they were failed experiments in multi-cellular life.
The authors of the paper recognise two new species of mushroom-shaped animal: Dendrogramma enigmatica and Dendrogramma discoides. Measuring only a few millimetres in size, the animals consist of a flattened disc and a stalk with a mouth on the end.
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