The discovery of a fossil showing an ancient sea creature with 18 tentacles surrounding its mouth has helped to solve a modern-day mystery about the origins of a gelatinous carnivore called a comb jelly, a new study finds.

The previously unknown “sea monster,” which scientists dubbed Daihua sanqiong, lived a whopping 518 million years ago in what is now China. And the extinct animal shares a number of anatomical characteristics with the modern comb jelly, a little sea creature that uses so-called comb rows full of loads of hair-like cilia to swim through the oceans.

The discovery suggests that this newfound species may be the comb jelly’s distant relative, said study lead researcher Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at Bristol University in the United Kingdom.

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