
Dendrogramma enigmatica is a species of siphonophore, the only one in its genus. It has been first described in 2014 on the basis of its morphology from a collection of specimens gathered in 1986. Its taxonomic affinity among animals was then unclear, but RNA from new specimens in 2016 allowed it to be identified as a siphonophore by barcoding and phylogenomics. The specimens are presumed to represent parts (bracts) of an entire siphonophore that has not been identified yet.
GENUS
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Dendrogramma enigmatica is a species of siphonophore, the only one in its genus. It has been first described in 2014 on the basis of its morphology from a collection of specimens gathered in 1986. Its taxonomic affinity among animals was then unclear, but RNA from new specimens in 2016 allowed it to be identified as a siphonophore by barcoding and phylogenomics. The specimens are presumed to represent parts (bracts) of an entire siphonophore that has not been identified yet.
== Discovery == The first Dendrogramma specimens were collected off the south-east coast of Australia during a scientific expedition in 1986. They were collected at water depths of and on the continental slope near Tasmania, using a sled that was dragged over the sea floor to collect bottom-dwelling animals. The researchers were immediately struck by the unusual characteristics of the 18 specimens they collected. These were preserved in formaldehyde, and later in ethanol, for further study.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).