Discovery: 'Adorable' bumpy slugfish filmed in the Pacific Ocean

A small, round head, a gelatinous pink body, and a pretty smile. A new species of slugfish has been discovered by a team of American scientists off the coast of California, at a depth of more than 3,000 meters. Filmed during an expedition led by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in 2019, the images of this strange fish were only made public on September 8, after years of work to identify the species in question. Named the bumpy slugfish, it turned out to be a new species.

"It's really adorable," Mackenzie Gerringer, a marine biologist at the State University of New York, told The New York Times . Gerringer said the discovery of the tiny, hand-sized fish proves that not everything is scary in the deep, barely 5 percent of which has been explored —the deep sea makes up 66 percent of the planet's surface.

Deep-sea creatures are not necessarily "monsters," the scientist enthuses.