Scientists have described a new family of brittle stars from a single specimen from a seamount off New Caledonia.

In theory, Tim O’Hara had come to Paris to map the biodiversity of a faraway seamount.

In practice, this meant sifting a plastic barrel of preserved brittle stars floating in 95 percent ethanol.

O’Hara scooped from the bucket looked unlike any brittle star he’d seen before.

O’Hara believes the echinoderm, which was collected on an earlier expedition to a seamount east of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, represents an entirely new family of brittle stars that hails from an ancient lineage dating back to the Jurassic and survives to this day.

“If I found this thing, I just would have died,” said Christopher Mah, a researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and expert on sea stars, who reviewed the paper.

He then called Ben Thuy, his longtime collaborator and a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History, Luxembourg, about his eight-armed dilemma.

It described some microfossils from the early Jurassic, including arm plates of a fossilized brittle star with the very same snouted openings.

With only a preserved specimen, the researchers don’t know how the newly described brittle star uses its proliferation of spine-like teeth, or even what color it was while alive.

But they do know this: The brittle star has thousands of pig snouts on each arm, a veritable sty in the benthos.

“There is no doubt that it is a new species and the genetic analysis suggesting a new family is strong,” Sabine Stöhr, an echinoderm biologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the research, wrote in an email.

The researchers do not know the next time an expedition will go to New Caledonia and happen to pick up another specimen of this seemingly rare brittle star.