With a head covered in rows of curved spines, ancient Selkirkia worms could easily be confused with the razor-toothed sandworms that inhabit the deserts of Arrakis in “Dune: Part Two.”
During the Cambrian Explosion more than 500 million years ago, these weird worms — which lived inside long, cone-shaped tubes — were some of the most common predators on the seafloor.
“If you were a small invertebrate coming across them, it would have been your worst nightmare,” said Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist at Harvard University. “It’s like being engulfed by a conveyor belt of fangs and teeth.”
Thankfully for would-be spice harvesters, these ravenous worms disappeared hundreds of million years ago. But a trove of recently analyzed fossils from Morocco reveals that these formidable predators measuring only 1 or 2 inches long, persisted much longer than previously thought.
In a paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Nanglu’s team described a new species of Selkirkia worm that lived 25 million years after this group of tube-dwellers was thought to have gone extinct.
The newly described tubular worms were discovered when Nanglu and his colleagues sifted through fossils stored in the collection of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The fossils hail from Morocco’s Fezouata Formation, a deposit dating to the Early Ordovician period, which began about 488 million years ago and spanned nearly 45 million years.
“This new study adds to a growing body of evidence that many members of Cambrian communities continued to thrive during the following Ordovician period and were not quickly replaced as previous evolutionary models might have suggested,” he said.
To Nanglu, the worms’ presence also suggests that sometimes, reality really is stranger than fiction.
“It’s like if the sandworm from ‘Dune’ is building a gigantic house around itself,” Nanglu said. “No matter how wild the thing you see on a screen is, I guarantee that there’s something in nature, even if it’s been extinct for a long time, that’s way wilder.” — JACK TAMISIEA/NYT
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