Mysterious 'Sea Monster' Confirmed as Giant Jellyfish

Some described the enormous sea blob as a whale placenta and some thought it to be a dirty mould-covered plastic bag. Experts have now confirmed that the mysterious underwater sea creature is nothing but a giant jellyfish.

Known as Deepstaria Enigmatica, the rare jellyfish species resembles a translucent, folding sheet or "lava lamp" as the animal moves.

Last month, a video posted on YouTube instigated speculation about the deep sea creature with many people suggesting it is the remains of a whale placenta or a fishnet. Some also thought that the creature might be a Stygiomedusa Gigantea jellyfish which can grow up to six metres in length and has only been spotted 114 times in 110 years.

"This bag-like jelly is not that rare, but is large, so rarely seen intact," Haddock writes on the JellyWatch Facebook page. "In the video, the swirling from the sub makes the medusa appear to undulate, and it even turns inside-out," the Daily Mail quoted Steven Haddock from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, as saying.

According to RT, at first glance, the so-called "Cascade Creature" looks like a piece of a dirty mould-covered plastic bag drifting by the camera. It moves so swiftly that the operator cannot properly follow it into the depths of the water. But then it returns and poses right in front of the camera for several minutes, exposing its strikingly unusual body from every side.

The creature reportedly resembles an octopus in that it is flexible and brown in colour. Unlike the former, the creature does not possess protruding tentacles.

"In the last 30 seconds or so you start to see more of the structure, these pendulous tubes with four or five whitish structures and some branching between them, which look to me like the gonads of a jellyfish," Dr Daniel Bucher commented to Ninemsn about the presence of sex organs on the creature.

The jellyfish was reportedly filmed during deep-sea drilling near the United Kingdom. The species is usually found approximately 5,000 feet below in the south Atlantic Ocean.