Scientists: New Pacific eel a 'living fossil'

Scientists have created a new family, genus and species for a “new" Pacific eel that has a long and independent evolutionary history stretching back to 200 million years. The team of US, Palauan and Japanese scientists gave the animal the Latin name Protoanguilla palau after much discussion about the animal’s affinities, according to a report on BBC. "In some features it is more primitive than recent eels, and in others, even more primitive than the oldest known fossil eels, suggesting that it represents a ‘living fossil’ without a known fossil record," the scientists said, according to a report on BBC. The researchers say the Protoanguilla lineage must have once been more widely distributed, because the undersea ridge where its cave home is located is between 60 and 70 million years old. An initial investigation showed the new family of eel had evolved for the last 200 million years, likely originating in the early Mesozoic era, when dinosaurs began to dominate the planet. Genetic analysis of the animal - an 18-cm-long female collected by one of the researchers during a dive at a 35-meter-deep cave in Palau - confirmed that the fish was a “true" although “primitive" eel, the BBC report added. The team, which included Masaki Miya from Chiba’s Natural History Museum in Japan; Jiro Sakaue from the Southern Marine Laboratory in Palau; and G David Johnson from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, drew up a family tree of different eels, showing the relationships between them, the same report said. — RSJ, GMA News