Introducing the Skeleton Panda Sea Squirt
Given the scientific name Clavelina ossipandae, scientists discovered that it was a new species of sea squirt after divers posted images of it online. Naohiro Hasegawa, a researcher at Hokkaido University and co-author of the study that first described the species in the journal Species Diversity, told Reuters: “The white parts that look like bones are the blood vessels that run horizontally through the sea squirts’ gills. The black parts on the head that look like a panda’s eyes and nose are just a pattern, and we don’t really know why the pattern is there.”
