12 ms·
30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in Greenland
- jjgreen 3y ago"Fossils of ..." in case you were as scared as me
- ReptileMan 3y agoI was just looking at the headline and "That is a good beginning of a horror movie"
- raverbashing 3y agoOr a techno-distopian space sci-fi movie ;)
- gilleain 3y agoSo Tremors, then?
- happosai 3y agoThis is the episode "ice" from x-files.
- NikkiA 3y agoSlow worms are bigger than this, also carnivorous (eat slugs and other common garden pests), but are completely harmless to humans, endangered and protected by law, and live human comparable lifespans. Basically, the headline makes something sound scary when it shouldn't really be.
- d1sxeyes 3y agoAlso relatively giant: > growing to more than 30cm in length
- nathancahill 3y agoThis centipede is a predator.
- mccrory 3y agoCentipede https://g.co/kgs/zUznwnH https://g.co/kgs/zUznwnH
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoSo the common earthworm, while usually much smaller, can grow to be 35cm. And from a quick search, the giant Oregon earthworm can grow to be 1.5 meters. So between the disappointment in the size of 'giant' and the age vs fossil age, this is a pretty big let down of a title. Now maybe I'm a bit of an idiot for even a second believing any creature could be hundreds of millions of years old - but in the flip side once you take away both of those qualifiers (giant and old) there isn't much story here to be much interest. Or at least not to me.
- gilleain 3y agoBigger : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchaetus_rappi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchaetus_rappi can grow to 6.7m !
- jjgreen 3y agoHoly crap: https://featuredcreature.com/hide-yo-kids-hide-yo-wife-theres-giant-earthworms-out-there/ https://featuredcreature.com/hide-yo-kids-hide-yo-wife-there...
- aftoprokrustes 3y agoLet's be fair to the title: 'giant' is in inverted commas, and the article is pretty straight to the point and does not try to drag on the expectation that the worm was 100s of meters long (or alive, but I was expecting a fossil). It does say, however, that it is the biggest knRecopiez le code 53587468 pour accéder à vos comptes Caisse d'Epargne. Si vous n'etes pas à l'origine de cette demande, contactez votre agence.own sea creature at the time: in my book, this is an acceptable definition of a giant. I was a bit disappointed by the size at first, but I actually found the article very interesting in a lot of aspects: how 30cm was giant at the time, how worms were the dominating family, and yet how similar they were to modern day worms are quite fascinating to me.
- vinu76jsr 3y agoI was, thanks for clarifying.
- gumballindie 3y agoAnd not gigantic. These headlines are becoming tiresome.
- rsynnott 3y agoIt's gigantic relative what you'd expect for predators at the time, is the point.
- gumballindie 3y agoYes, but casual readers such as myself expected a worm the size of a bus. The title was made to mislead people like into clicking. Why it’s called clickbait.
- rsynnott 3y agoClearly you have been watching too much Dune.
- RuggedPineapple 3y agoThat's... huge? I don't really see the problem with that. This is from the veryearly Cambrian. The first thing we tentatively assign as an 'animal' (Caveasphaera) came less then 100 million years before it. It comes from the same million year period that featured the first known arthropod (Kylinxia) and absolutely dwarfed that creature. It's 6 times longer. The size difference between this and what else was around seems pretty close to the difference between you and an elephant.
- rvbissell 3y agoRight? I was expecting something akin to an ALASKAN BULL WORM (viz. spongebob)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cryptoegorophy 3y agoCan you explain to non English speaker?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Raed667 3y agoShai Hulud
- hasoleju 3y agoI always wonder if fossils preserve the original size of the former animal. I can easily imagine that trough pressure the original animal is compressed and appears smaller as a fossil afterwards.
- londons_explore 3y agoMost fossils are two rocks - one around the animal, and one that fills the cavity of the animal later. The 'filler' usually isn't sedimentary - it tends to be formed by something that seeps through then crystalizes. Those crystals are super hard, and generally won't be compressible at all. Although there is a good chance the cavity compressed a bit before being filled.
- laszlojamf 3y agoTIL So is there like a flat imprint of all the biological residue or is it more like a shell, if you know what I mean? Also, what kind of crystals are w usually talking about?
- systems_glitch 3y agoDepends on the fossil and enclosing material. A lot of the fossils we found as kids in slate were flattened, but sandstone fossils tended to be more like injection molded.
- jacquesm 3y agoA fantastic example of this is 'the petrified forest'. https://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm https://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm Straight from the Triassic.
- andrewflnr 3y agoWhen a rock is squished, it's usually compressed in one direction but spreads out in the other. You do get fossils that are completely flattened in one direction, but the other dimensions will be pretty much original. I don't think you'll ever see a rock or fossil just get smaller in every dimension under pressure. At minimum you would see really obvious distortion. Ed: to clarify my first two sentences, when you see a flattened fossil, IIRC they were already flat before they turned to rock, by relatively light forces acting on the body. It wouldn't spread out sideways unless the whole rock it was fossilized in was later squished by geologic forces.
- noduerme 3y agoThe Earth is older and stranger than we can imagine. On a side note, I miss SimLife. Where is the game that simulates completely bizarre but believable evolutionary outcomes on different worlds...
- guerrilla 3y agoHave you tried Spore?
- ganzuul 3y agoThat's what Spore promised but did not deliver.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- digging 3y agoAlthough it absolutely chugs after a while on my PC, The Sapling[1] is a newer sandbox game which simulates evolution pretty effectively. It's simple and made by one person, don't expect too much. But at its core it is fulfilling some of the dreams left on the cutting room floor of Spore. [1] https://thesaplinggame.com https://thesaplinggame.com
- noduerme 3y agoThat looks like a cool little project... one of the great features of simlife was how species mutated and competed for actual territory with each other, and could form these kinds of mutually beneficial or destructive relationships with others. I like that this is sort of going in that direction.
- gadders 3y ago>> "and growing to more than 30cm in length" I'd fight one.
- mc32 3y agoI would not risk an infection. A nice rock back then or one of musk’s flame throwers today or even the back of a shovel.
- gadders 3y agoHopefully I would at least be allowed gloves or what I can find on the ground. Did we have trees and sticks then?
- digging 3y agoNo, it's roughly 200 million years too early for woody plants. Rocks aplenty, though.
- gadders 3y agoIt is mad to think we had animals before we had trees (even if the animals were in the sea).
- digging 3y agoIs it? We've had animals in the sea for a very long time. They were developing complex ecosystems before we even had plants on land.
- gadders 3y agoMaybe it's just me, but I guess I have a rough idea in my head of evolution following relative complexity of the organism. EG: Sea single-celled orgs -> land single-celled orgs -> sea plants -> land plants -> sea animals -> land animals. (I realise there will be some overlaps though)
- flipgimble 3y agoIf ever an article needed an artist's rendition. I'd love to see the massive jaw structure to see how afraid I should be for my toes if some crazy billionaire decides to do a Cambrian Park. This worm is about a foot long after all.
- adrian_b 3y agoThe article in Science has more details, including a higher resolution variant of the bluish artistic rendition from the right upper corner. The jaws have been preserved only partially. The jaws of even a giant arrow worm would not be very dangerous for your toes, because they are designed to hook any prey, to prevent its escaping, like also the teeth of many fish, and not for cutting or crushing. Nevertheless, it seems that the jaws of this ancestor of the arrow worms were less similar to those of the modern arrow worms than to the jaws of the so-called gnathostomulids, so they might have had a stronger crushing action than in modern arrow worms. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi6678 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi6678
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wiredfool 3y agoGiant worms are a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Gippsland_earthworm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Gippsland_earthworm
- hyperific 3y agoI should have known it'd be Australian.
- notnmeyer 3y agohaha, my thoughts exactly. went scanning through the wikipedia and saw it was austrailian, and thought, "oh, that makes sense".
- monkeydreams 3y agoAustralian giant earthworms are larger than this by far.
- ceejayoz 3y agoScarier ones exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois They're terrifying in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7ByiYbCYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7ByiYbCYM
- ubermonkey 3y agoThese aren't scary to people DIRECTLY, but ISTR that they can be a SERIOUS problem in aquariums. There was a tale online a while back about an aquarium hobbyist who realized the coral he'd brought into his very fancy tank apparently had a bobbit in it, and how he eventually got it out. You can't just pull it out; apparently, it'll split, and then you have TWO of them. https://whyy.org/segments/liz-bobbit-worm/ https://whyy.org/segments/liz-bobbit-worm/ tl;dr: he got it out, but it was SEVEN FEET LONG.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
- boiler_up800 3y agoHaving gotten into the Hollow Knight series recently, this speaks to me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- languagehacker 3y agoDisappointed no one has mentioned Dune here yet
- Brajeshwar 3y agoMy friend and I used to build mental model on how to escape if ‘Giant’ Worm like predators aka Tremors[1] tries to attack while playing in the sandy river banks. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremors_(1990_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremors_(1990_film)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ametrau 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sebastianconcpt 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dsign 3y ago>> Perhaps they had a dynasty of about 10-15 million years before they got superseded by other, and more successful, groups. If a primitive worm managed 10-15 million years, we Homo Sapiens should do better, because no new predator is going to evolve during our watch. As long as we don't make any new predators, by, say, connecting a few LLMs until they are self-aware, hungry and angry, we should be fine.
- chmod775 3y ago> because no new predator is going to evolve during our watch. Queue some micro-organism evolving, wiping out mankind, evolving further to achieve self awareness, creating a micro-civilization, digging up this post, and putting it in a micro-gallery with a tiny sign "this aged badly".
- NerdiDotOrg 3y agoLol and then they'll have some sort of theory of fallen angels, giants, etc but for many years they'll be focused on their origins as the first civilization and they'll deny evolution.
- digging 3y ago> Queue (nitpick) Correctly spelled but wrong word - you're actually looking for "cue".
- toss1 3y agoThe other thing we must avoid is destroying ourselves or the ecosystem upon which we depend. It still hasn't been determined whether the Great Filter is ahead of us or behind us, and it is entirely plausible that most technological societies end u self-terminating through one of many combinations of technological advancement, hubris, and stupidity.
- yewenjie 3y ago> more than half a billion years old For a moment I got scared that it is alive and is half a billion years old.
- sekh60 3y agoShai Hulud?
- justsomeoldguy 3y agowhoever controls the spice...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- grahamlee 3y agoThe spice must flow.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yreg 3y agoMy immediate question was "how giant?" Turns out 30 cm.
- mosselman 3y ago‘Giant’
- Pet_Ant 3y ago...for a worm.
- zamadatix 3y agoThe most common type of earthworm commonly grows longer than this largest 30 cm specimen and that's orders of magnitude shorter than the longest worms.
- jermaustin1 3y agoCan you provide more details on these 50m worms. How girthy are they?
- yreg 3y agoThis worm = 3 x 10^1 cm The order of magnitude longer worm = 3 x 10^2 cm Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois#Description
- karaterobot 3y agoRelative to modern worms, pretty big. Relative to other Cambrian fauna, pretty big (I think?). Relative to those worms from Tremors, pathetic.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eggy 3y agoNo, "Lair of the White Worm" here, but a 30cm worm would instill terror in me (unless Amanda Donohoe and Catherine Oxenberg were with me! Sorry, Sammi Davis...).
- NikkiA 3y agoOne of my earliest memories is of a 'giant' snake-like worm. It turns out it was a slow worm at about their full size, 50cm long, when I was a toddler.
- aatd86 3y ago"Goa'uld found under icecap"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- layer8 3y agoI wouldn’t trust that guy holding the “fossil” plate now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brlebtag 3y ago[flagged]
- Apocryphon 3y agoWe have wormsign