The second expedition was conceived in 1941 in discussions between journalist and author Hakon Mielche and oceanographer and ichthyologist Anton Frederik Bruun.
The second Galathea expedition led to the discovery of, among other things, the fish species Antipodocottus galatheae[REF] and Abyssobrotula galatheae,[REF] the snail species Guttula galatheae[REF] and, above all, living Monoplacophora,[REF] a class of "ancestral mollusc" which until then was known only from the fossil record.