Elementary teacher Romnick Masayao discovered four unusual boys when he went visiting children in the remote mountain community of Malita, Davao Occidental in 2021.

The sons of Merna Madanga, Joshua and Angelo, were small like young children but were actually 16 and 19 years old, respectively.

In a nearby house, Masayao found the boys’ cousins, Erwin and Johnro, who were also under four feet tall. The ambulant teacher learned the two children of Marita were already 13 and 17 years old, respectively.

The mothers narrated on the TV show, “KMJS,” that they stopped sending their children to school because they were being bullied due their size caused by the condition called Hunter Syndrome, and they hid them instead on the mountain. The rare genetic disorder is marked by premature aging without the corresponding body growth.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway found a different creature inside a laboratory tank that had contained a comb jellyfish (Mnemiopsis leidyi). In place of the fish was a larva of the same species.

To verify their suspicion that the comb jellyfish had aged in reverse and returned to infancy, the researchers conducted experiments recreating the process. Their findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Joan J. Soto-Angel, co-author of the published study, described the slow transition of the jellyfish to a typical cydippid larva “as if they were going back in time.”

“Over several weeks, they not only reshaped their morphological features, but also had a completely different feeding behavior, typical of a cydippid larva,” she said, the New York Post (NYP) reports.

Interestingly, previous research suggests that comb jellyfish may have been the first animal species to appear on earth 700 million years ago, according to NYP.

Their existence till today is attributed by scientists to its “ability to reverse growth and development.”