A weird study that involved alligator corpses also turned up a bone-eating life-form in the depths of the sea.

For their study, scientists strapped three dead alligators into weighted harnesses and dropped them down 6,600 feet into the Gulf of Mexico as a way to test how carbon-hungry creatures in the ocean would react to a new, unfamiliar food source.

"The deep ocean is a food desert, sprinkled with food oases," study co-author Clifton Nunnally, of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, said in a creepy video about the experiment. "Some of these oases are vents in the ocean floor where chemicals come out or food falling from the ocean's surface."

NUCLEAR WINTER WOULD TRIGGER A GLOBAL FAMINE, BUT ONE EXPERT SAYS HIS DOOMSDAY DIET COULD SAVE HUMANITY

The results of their study, published late last month in PLUS ONE, showed that each gator corpse suffered a similar fate -- however, the second one was picked clean down to the bones.

As Live Science reports, the gator's bones were covered in a mysterious brown fuzz, which a DNA analysis showed to be a newly found species of bone-eating worm.

The third gator completely disappeared from its harness before any marine creatures were seen eating it, leading researchers to speculate that a shark chomped through the rope to haul the gator carcass away.

GET THE FOX NEWS APP