Description of the discovery:
Will close once the team shares a publication/preprint/press release with what they believe are final findings on the subject (most likely this will be a classification into a phylogenetic group based on DNA). Will resolve to the preprint findings if there are no comments (Pubpeer, social media, ...) disputing the results two weeks after the release. If there is dispute, I may wait for resolution or resolve to my understanding of the community consensus.
If no followup is published in two years, this resolves NA.
Update: answers need to be added before the results are made public. Answers added later won't receive any payout
Since the resolution is partially subjective, I will not bet on this market.
1,000Some time ago, NOAA released a report on the expedition: https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/60802/noaa_60802_DS1.pdf Unfortunately, it only mentions that "Numerous media and web news outlets around the country and around the world covered the story about the mysterious golden object" and provides no followup.