#lokiarchaea

guys they live in an underwater volcano

The mysterious group, called Lokiarchaea, rose to prominence from microbial muck dredged up not far from Loki’s Castle, a sea-floor hydrothermal vent field off the coast of Greenland ... dotted throughout this genome were eukaryotic-like genes, suggesting that this oddball could help to bridge the evolutionary gap between simpler microbes and eukaryotes. The researchers called it Lokiarchaea, after Loki, the trickster of Norse mythology. Soon, other labs found additional Loki-like archaea, and together these formed the Asgard archaea, named after a mythological region inhabited by Norse gods. Although the organisms’ precise place in the tree of life remains contentious, many analyses pair Asgards and eukaryotes together, which could mean that some distant Asgard-like ancestor gave rise to all eukaryotes — everything from panda bears to portabello mushrooms.