Scientists baffled by ‘alien’ goldfish with no anus, backbone or shell

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alien goldfish”, has possibly been solved by scientists who believe the creature to be a sort of mollusc.First discovered in the Bear Gulch Limestone fossil site in Montana, United State in the late 1960s, the Typhloesus wellsi lived about 330million years ago.

The anatomy of the species hadscientists stumped on its position on the tree of life with the creature possessing a rugby ball-shaped body, a lack of a shell as well as no backbone or anus.READ MORE:Prince Philip investigated UFOs for 70 years - now 'Royal X-Files' could be releasedDr Jean-Bernard Caron, a co-author of the research from the Royal Ontario Museum, said: “[Typhloesus] was sort of an orphan in the tree of life.”Caron added: “What we think is that [Typhloesus] might be some sort of unique group of molluscs that evolved during the carboniferous [period] and eventually went extinct.”Alongside his colleague Professor Simon Conway Morris, from the University of Cambridge, the pair describe how they studied about a dozen specimens of Typhloesus housed in the Royal Ontario Museum and discussed evidence they found resulting in their deductions.In the foregut of Typhloesus, there was a 4mm-long structure comprised of two rows of about 20 triangular teeth, curved backwards with researchers suggesting the Typhloesus turned this structure inside out.Caron said: “An analogy here [is] the tongue of a lizard, for example, capturing an insect.