When a six-foot-long gelatinous animal turned up off Brazil’s Bahia cost, initial accounts quoted scientists calling the creature “completely new, scientifically speaking.” However, fish experts taking a closer look at the video footage have now managed to identify it as being a member of Ateleopodidae, an elusive family of deep-sea fish known as jellynoses or tadpole fish.

“As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was,” said Dave Johnson, ichthyologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The family Ateleopodidae is a group of deep-dwelling fishes known for their soft, blunt noses, small teeth, and scaleless, tapered bodies.

Despite being identified by science as early as the 1840s, we still know very little about this family and only about a dozen species have been named and described. They are found at depths ranging from about 1,300 to 2,300 feet (400 to 700 meters), where the lack of oxygen and nutrients makes being a gelatinous blob with very little muscle tissue superior to having a strong, burly body.

“You don’t ever see any hard, muscular fishes like tuna in the deep sea,” Johnson said, since at those depths there aren’t enough oxygen and nutrients to feed dense muscle tissue.

The Ateleopodidae fish was found floating dead by researchers from the Brazilian TAMAR Program, a sea turtle conservation group. If this species is already known to science or not remains unclear, but it is certainly the first of its kind ever to be identified in Brazilian waters.

“I’ve never heard of anything [like this] caught off the Brazil coast at all,” says marine biologist Jon Moore of Florida Atlantic University who has studied the diets of Ateleopodidae fish.

You can watch a movie here.