The Little Mermaid would have you believe that all undersea creatures are cute and cuddly, but reality is more akin to a horror novel by American writer H.P. Lovecraft, with the deep sea playing host to scary life forms.

The latest find by a group of scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, based at the University of California in San Diego, is a 20-armed creature that has a body resembling a strawberry.

Dubbed the Promachocrinus fragarius, or Antarctic strawberry feather star, the creature resembles a writhing mass of tentacles, and was the fruit of 16 years of labour by the three scientists, whose paper on the genus was published in the Invertebrate Systematics journal on July 14.

They had conducted a series of expeditions to the Antarctic Ocean between 2008 and 2017 in hopes of determining if the Antarctic feather star – a relative of the starfish, sea urchin and sea cucumber – is a cryptic species.

Prior to the latest discovery, which also identified three other new species of the sea creature, it was uncertain if the Antarctic feather star was a singular species in the genus, or if there were other species as well.

DNA collected from the samples caught indicated that there were actually more, with the Antarctic strawberry feather star in particular said to have a “purplish” to “dark-reddish” colour, and believed to live somewhere between 65m and 1,170m underwater.

The size of the creature was not given in the journal and the abstract of the research paper stated that more large-scale sampling is needed to understand the full extent of the biodiversity of the Antarctic Ocean.

And so, even as mankind seeks to explore the final frontier, it seems that our planet too continues to hide its own secrets yet to be uncovered.