Balanoglossus in Mashail Island described it as a worm-like holothurian. The discovery of gill-slits in this animal by Kowalewsky (1865) led to creation of a special class Enteropneusta by Gegenbaur (1870). Bateson (1885) included them in Phylum Chordata. Hyman (1959), however, placed them near Echinodermata and gave Hemichordata a status of an independent phylum. This simple organism shows affinities with several diverse groups. Balanoglossus is a tuberculos or burrowing and exclusively marine animal. It is found in shallow waters between tide marks along the coast of warm and temperate oceans. Balanoglossus clavigerus is a U-shaped excavated in a sandy bottom Nemertines
Bacterial phyla prevents it to be validated, such as where the only evidence is DNA sequence data, even if the whole genome has been sequenced. When the species are members of a whole phylum it is called a candidate division (or candidate phylum) and in 2003 there were 26 candidate phyla out of 52. A candidate phylum was defined by Hugenholtz and Pace in 1998, as a set of 16S ribosomal RNA sequences with less than 85% similarity to already-described phyla. More recently an even lower threshold of 75% was proposed. Three candidate phyla were known before 1998, prior to the 85%