“It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. And mostly dead, is slightly alive.”

The Princess Bride played this scene as an absolute riot, and we were all able to laugh at Billy Crystal’s antics because we all know that in reality, something is alive or dead, and there is no in between.

Or, is there?

Viruses are a good example of organisms that challenge the concept of “life.” They are not alive, because they don’t grow or reproduce on their own, but once they infect a host they are very active.

Recently, scientists have discovered a new organism that exists in this gray area between alive and not. Researchers are calling the vexing little thing ‘Sukunaarchaeum mirabile,’ and say that though this entity contains the necessary genes to create its own ribosomes and messenger RNA (unlike viruses), it still passes off biological functions to its host.

The only thing it focuses on doing alone is replicating itself.

“Its genome is profoundly stripped-down, lacking virtually all recognizable metabolic pathways, and primarily encoding the machinery for its replicative core: DNA replication, transcription, and translation. This suggests an unprecedented level of metabolic dependence on a host, a condition that challenges the functional distinctions between minimal cellular life and viruses.”

Ryo Harada, a Canadian molecular biologist, led the study. His team found this creature while studying the bacterial genome of marine plankton, when they stumbled on a loop of DNA that didn’t match the species they were studying. They determined its domain but were unable to classify it further.

Sukunaarchaeum only has about 238,000 base pairs of DNA, which is less than half the number had by the smallest known archaeal genome, which is one thing that definitely fascinated them.

“The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum pushes the conventional boundaries of cellular life and highlights the vast unexplored biological novelty within microbial interactions. Further exploration of symbiotic systems may reveal even more extraordinary life forms, reshaping our understanding of cellular evolution.”

Biology is really out here discovering new and weird things every day.

And in this case, we’re going to call it slightly alive.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about 50 amazing finds on Google Earth.