Scientists from London's Natural History Museum and Göteborg University have pulled off a bit of a coup in discovering a previously-unknown species of worm feeding on a dead minke whale bones.

The 1-2cm creature, boasting "frond-like tentacles" was found devouring a minke skeleton off the Swedish coast at a depth of 120m, the Times reports, adding little except to note that it has been named Osedax mucofloris - or "bone-eating snot flower" to its mates.

Not the most attractive of scientific monikers, it must be said, but not as silly as Cummingtonite (a mineral made up of magnesium iron silicate hydroxide and named after Cummington, Massachusetts where it was first discovered) or Arsole - the the arsenic equivalent of pyrrole. ®

Bootnote

There's more on the bone-eating snot flower down at the BBC.

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