Nonsense alert! The Guardian made a potentially interesting story completely muddled. "Same family as centipedes"??? For one thing, centipedes are a diverse *Terrrestrial* Class of Arthropods many different families; none of them are found in the oceans. The Zookeys article (which is an open publication) referenced by the Guardian article has no mention of centipedes but does mention Scapellomorph barnacles, which are marine crustaceans, the dominant arthropod class in today's oceans. At least jellyfish are Cnidarians, but certainly not the "same family as jellyfish"; same problem as the "centipede" quote. I get that newspapers have to avoid a lot of jargon so people will understand their articles, but they could at least tried to be a bit more accurate, or maybe run the article past one of the scientists to weed out the silly things. The other issue is the quotes in the article from some of the scientists, where they are attempting to make their research look new and interesting. As it happens, megafauna - the big things they are talking about - have been studied in this area for decades and are relatively well known. Organizations do this a lot to promote their funded and hopefully to be funded research but the attitude that they were the "first" is just plain rubbish. The scientists did discover a bunch of new species of sea floor critters but this is what happens when you do any detailed biological research anywhere in the deep sea. One of the smaller sized groups, peracarid crustaceans, are incredibly diverse. Crustacean assemblages change in species composition rapidly over the vast expanse of the central Pacific Ocean. Rough calculations estimate that one group alone is known from only a tiny fraction of the total species possible in the entire study region of the Pacific. The article didn't really get into why in the world anyone would fund expensive deep sea research in the middle of the Pacific. Once one knows that the polymetallic nodules (consisting mostly of metal oxides) that grow spontaneously at the sea floor in this region contain mostly manganese oxides and iron but also smaller traces of nickel, cobalt and rare earth minerals, one can see why the mining companies might be very interested. International government regulators get involved to make sure permanent damage is not done to the environment by the proposed mining. This leads to the funding for the research that helps fill in the what is known and what is unknown (which in this case is a lot!). [Full disclosure - my 2017 article was referenced by the Zookeys article]

As a professional systematist**, this is the kind of claptrap I have to deal with on a daily basis. I use both types of data (morphological and DNA) and people should understand that molecular biology does not replace morphological taxonomy, but it provides another useful source of data. What is used for DNA data these days are a tiny part (especially DNA barcodes) of the functional organism, and the phenotype comes about in ways we do not completely understand yet. Because of the attitude shown in this post, several generations of biologists are not taught how to identify animals of any sort; zoological and botanical survey courses are being dropped from cirricula at most universities, especially here in Australia. I won't even work with Australian students anymore, because they both don't know anything basic, and because of their background seem more interested in their smart phone than looking down a microscope. So yes, taxonomists like me are becoming a rarity, both because of declining interest but also because of a lack of jobs for anyone who wants to take up the field. And yet I regularly get requests from the molecular only students to tell them what they have -- for free. **((I name species and groups, but I am also interested in evolution biogeography etc))