A mysterious golden egg has been discovered two miles down on the seafloor in the Gulf of Alaska.
The egg has confused marine scientists, who aren’t sure what animal might have laid the golden egg. It was first discovered by a team of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) team on Aug. 30.
NOAA Ocean Exploration’s Seascape Alaska mission was stationed 250 miles off the southern Alaskan coast using remote-operated vehicles to explore an extinct underwater volcano when it came across the golden egg casing.
MORE: David Attenborough to narrate third installment of ‘Planet Earth’
The discovery, which was being streamed online, definitely gave scientists and viewers pause.
“I’m pretty sure this is how the first episode of the X-Files started,” joked one team member.
“I just hope when we poke it, something doesn’t decide to come out. … It’s like the beginning of a horror movie,” said another team member with hesitation.
But, of course, they couldn’t resist picking it up and learning more about this strange discovery. Using the “hands” of their remote-operated vehicle, they gingerly touched the egg to see what would happen. Then, they used the device’s suction capability to safely pick up the egg and bring it safely back to shore.
“While we were able to collect the ‘golden orb’ and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin,” expedition coordinator Sam Candio said in a statement from NOAA. “We likely won’t learn more until we are able to get it into a laboratory setting where we can continue to pull from the collective expertise of the scientific community with more sophisticated tools than we are able to maintain on the ship.”
MORE: How this mysterious object ended up on a beach
Although it might seem like a shocking find, ocean experts say that the truth is that we don’t know very much about life in the deep ocean.
“We often find things in the deep ocean that we haven’t seen before or don’t immediately recognize, because the deep ocean is vast and we’ve only been exploring what lives there over the past couple of centuries, unlike life on land,” University of Southampton ocean exploration professor Jon Copley told The Washington Post.
Hopefully, we will soon find out more about what might have laid this beautiful egg!
Any products or services mentioned above were selected independent of sales and advertising. However, Simplemost may receive a small commission from the purchase of any products or services through an affiliate link to the retailer's website.
This story originally appeared on Simplemost. Check out Simplemost for additional stories.
