500 million years ago, the world was a very different place. During this period of time, known as the Cambrian period, basically all life was in the water. The ocean was brimming with animals that looked pretty different from the ones we recognize today — including a group of predatory worms with a throat covered in teeth and spines.
Researchers thought these tiny terrors died out at the end of the Cambrian period. But a paper published recently in the journalfossil found in a collection from the Fezouata Formation in Morocco.Javier Ortega Hernández/Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
One of these was a group of predatory worms with throats covered in spines, hooks and teeth to trap their prey. They built tubes around themselves and lived inside of them, waiting for their next victim to crawl by."These worms are pretty small ... But if you're an invertebrate crawling along the sea floor, this thing is like a nightmare — just like predatory features all being pushed out of its throat at you," sayssample is measured to indicate its overall size.
"From the biological perspective, maybe some of these boundaries are a little bit more fuzzy than we previously thought," he says.
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