For more than a century, crustaceans called facetotectans appeared to live in a biological Neverland: nobody had ever seen an adult member of the species, until now.

The young facetotectans, known by the riveting moniker “y-larvae,” were first identified in 1899. These relatives of barnacles are not scarce — more than 40 different species of y-larvae live all over the world. But in a hundred years of hunting for an adult, scientists never found one. Everything they knew about these peculiar crustaceans came from studying the young, and that didn’t reveal much — imagine if everything we knew about dogs came from looking at puppies.

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Airplane wings, wind turbines, and boat rudders are so smooth they invite you to run your hand over them. The smoother the surface, the less drag it produces, and the easier it moves through the air or water — or so says conventional engineering wisdom. Humpback whales, however, move their massive frames around in a different way.

The leading edge of a whale’s fin looks more like a ripped piece of cardboard. It’s covered in little bumps called tubercles that give it an uneven texture and increase upward pressure on the fin. Practically, that means a two-ton marine creature can make sharp turns and elegant maneuvers to capture its dinner of fish and crustaceans. So if whales move this well with serrated fins, maybe we’re missing something with our smooth-as-a-baby’s-bottom surfaces.

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