Mysterious Golden Orb Identified! - YouTube

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A years-long mystery about a shiny blob found at the bottom of the ocean has finally been solved.

There were many theories about what it could be. Perhaps it was an egg, a sponge or a mat of microbes.

"Everyone was like, 'What the heck? What is that?,'" Allen Collins , a zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told Live Science.

A close up image of the “golden orb” in the lab of the Smithsonian Institution. The orb was found on the seafloor off Alaska in 2023. (Image credit: NOAA Fisheries)

Now, he's led an analysis that has finally revealed what the orb is ‪—‬ and it turns out that it's something secreted by a mysterious deep-sea creature called Relicanthus daphneae .

"The first thing we were looking for was gross anatomy," he said. "Is there a mouth somewhere? Can we find muscles? The sort of thing that would tell us that it's some particular kind of an animal.…