Scientists stumbled upon four pitch-black eggs 20,000 feet below ocean. They turned out to be...

Four jet black eggs found in the Pacific Ocean left scientists stunned since they had never seen anything like this before. The eggs were attached to a rock and were discovered roughly at a depth of 6,200 meters (20,341 feet). The researchers from Tokyo University and Hokkaido University in Japan were exploring the region using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) when they came across the strange-looking eggs. The region was the abyssopelagic zone, the deepest layer of most of the ocean. Finding black eggs at this depth was a breakthrough since very little is known about the creatures that live here. So, University of Tokyo marine researcher Yasunori Kano decided to retrieve the eggs. Most of them were broken, but four were still intact. He sent them over to invertebrate biologists at Hokkaido University who analysed them. Also Read: Blind creature like a dragon, and also scorpion, is crawling in South Korean caves

Eggs or flatworm cocoons?

They found these eggs to be tiny cocoons with flatworms inside them. Hokkaido University’s Keiichi Kakui, co-author of the study on the eggs published in the journal Biology Letters, told IFLScience that he "had never seen flatworm cocoons." When he cut one of them open, a milky liquid-like thing leaked from it. He blew it off and found fragile white bodies in the shell and realised that it was the cocoon of platyhelminths. Also Read: 511 billion barrels of oil discovered in Antarctica can trigger World War. Here's how

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Deepest flatworms ever found in ocean

He says that this is the first time these flatworms have been discovered at such depths. Before this, the , the deepest flatworm was observed at around 5,200 metres, discovered attached to a piece of wood. However, it could have fallen along with the wood into deeper waters and it is not clear if it lives there. DNA examination of the cocoons revealed that these flatworms were a species of phylum Platyhelminth that had remained undescribed till then. The paper states that despite being “the deepest known record of free-living platyhelminths,” the flatworms weren't different from the ones that live in shallow waters. Also Read: String of structural anomalies south of Gomati creek reignite search for sunken city of Dwarka

The world's oceans are the biggest mystery to mankind yet. It is almost impossible to learn about every species that lives in the waters on Earth as they cover the biggest area on the planet. The discovery of black eggs at one of the deepest points is a step towards learning what is the ocean hiding.