Some people follow sports. Others study the law. Some study birds and collect them. Others love building things and go into construction.
Well, some people like to discover and learn about everything in our world, or perhaps just some parts of it. Doing so is interesting (to them), and it often produces useful information for the rest of us as well.
That's why bother.
and involved a team of scientists from the NOAA Fisheries and the Smithsonian. NOAA Fisheries’ National Systematics Laboratory director and zoologist Allen Collins explained that the researchers are used to working with hundreds of samples, “but this turned into a special case that required focused efforts and expertise of several different individuals. This was a complex mystery that required morphological, genetic, deep-sea and bioinformatics expertise to solve.”
Not “some people”; It was done by us, using taxpayer $$’s.
Not to be a wise guy, but how did this study help our economy and/or strengthen our national security?
And yet I bet that any competent oceanographer and or marine biologist had already hypothesized that it was a part of a deep-sea anemone body part...fish sushi.
It was and is a waste of time and effort. If you spend you life identifying garbage. Garbage is all you see.
I also smelled a bit of grant time money grubbing in the original news article. That’s why they recycle stories about the aglet and the egress.
Publish trash, just publish, got to get that grant money....
On July 21, 1969, Neil A. Armstrong took his first step on the lunar surface and discovered...Tang.