30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in Greenland | Hacker News Reader

30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in Greenland

bristol.ac.uk

141 pointsclouddrover117 comments

I 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.

Most 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.

TIL 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?

Depends 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.

A fantastic example of this is 'the petrified forest'.

https://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm

Straight from the Triassic.

When 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.

Giant worms are a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Gippsland_earthworm

I should have known it'd be Australian.

haha, my thoughts exactly. went scanning through the wikipedia and saw it was austrailian, and thought, "oh, that makes sense".

Australian giant earthworms are larger than this by far.

Scarier ones exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois

They're terrifying in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7ByiYbCYM

These 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/

tl;dr: he got it out, but it was SEVEN FEET LONG.

I remember that thread! I briefly flirted with saltwater reef tanks before deciding it was way, way more than my ADHD-addled brain could take. Great summary of the key moments.

There are several things in life that look really cool, but that I also know myself well enough to avoid. Saltwater aquariums are on that list.

> apparently, it'll split, and then you have TWO of them.

This sounds like a myth to me so I tried to confirm / debunk it. It seems that all the online reporting goes back to a story about a specimen found in Woking aquatics[0].

The store manager said that when the worm broke into three pieces, the head piece lived on and the middle piece moved around as well.

I'm not confident that means that the middle piece grew a new head and continued to live.

Can anyone here shed more light on this?

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-24523612.amp

edit: btw, the story linked by the parent is great

It's certainly plausible.

https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/local-news/bobbit-worms-spl...

> Marine biologist Dr Nicholas Higgs - who works at Plymouth University's Marine Institute and was a PhD student at the Natural History Museum in London - said: "Many species of bristle worm have the ability to regenerate parts of their body, even the head or tail.

This needs it's own submission.

Well, another reminder that monsters do in fact exist.

Worth its own HN submission?

All of life “beneath” humanity basically lives in a 24/7 horror movie, as far as I can tell.

Humans only do so part-time.

The fact that most of us don't have to constantly worry of something bigger, stronger and faster than us snatching us at nigh to devour us or our families half alive is something we should be very, very thankful for. Our ancestors may have gone a bit overboard, which is why today there just isn't any predator near human habitation (with very few exceptions) and there's no giant predators at all, we killed them all.

What about the tiny predators of bacteria and virus sorts, and of course genetic aberrations with cancers? Tiny predators are the apex we generally are vulnerable in light of.

Those are more difficult, but we're in the process of killing them off too.

As usual, without much regard to consequences.

Forget predators, our ancestors were afraid of the weather. Just about anything in the world would kill them if they let it.

/me goes off to chase tornadoes

invisibly tiny bacteria were also very likely to kill you, and still often do

I was not prepared for this part:

> The [worm] name is taken from the John and Lorena Bobbitt case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_Lorena_Bobbitt

Truly impressive images, but the foley sounds and music in that video are so idiotic.

Ah, graboids.

Is that of the same genus as the Sarlacc?

Yes, Cinematicus genus. ;-)

One of my most hair-raising memories is dissecting marine worms. I remember a tub full of them. Makes me shiver even now even though that was decades ago.

Almost as bad as giant isopods. I'm fairly certain HP Lovecraft saw one and dreamed up the Deep One.

And here you can taste them. :)

https://udn-com.translate.goog/news/story/7270/7205951?_x_tr...

The Wikipedia photograph is both spectacular, scary and very alien (to us terrestrial life-forms): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Eunice_a...

I can see where sci-fi/horror film-makers get their inspiration.

oh my god, that birefringence is beautiful.

I think its iridescence not birefringence, still pretty none the less

If you like Eunice you'll love its 400 million years old ancestor from Canada, Websteroprion

The latter video (from the Smithsonian Channel) turned me off with its stereotypical "Male Announcer Emphatically Warning You Of Danger" voice. Would love to have the same video narrated by Paul Reubens, Emma Watson, or Barry White.

non mobile link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Gippsland_earthworm

That's pretty gross, but kind of what you'd expect> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WVrtABlU4

This is why I shrugged when I misread this as "30cm worm fossil... found in Gippsland".

I do love me the Karmais. It was a rare joy to see that their range had spread again a few years ago as they were (and still are) very close to extinct.

My 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)

"Fossils of ..." in case you were as scared as me

I was just looking at the headline and "That is a good beginning of a horror movie"

Or a techno-distopian space sci-fi movie ;)

So Tremors, then?

This is the episode "ice" from x-files.

Slow 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.

Also relatively giant:

> growing to more than 30cm in length

This centipede is a predator.

Centipede https://g.co/kgs/zUznwnH

So 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.

Bigger : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchaetus_rappi can grow to 6.7m !

Holy crap: https://featuredcreature.com/hide-yo-kids-hide-yo-wife-there...

Let'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.

Looks like you accidentally pasted the content of what seems like an SMS with a login code. I'd delete that ;-)

Indeed... Too late for that, but it will teach me to proof read every comment before hitting send!

On the positive side, no comment of mine ever generated that much engagement!

>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

I think you accidently hit control-v in the middle of a word

I take your (or the worm's) bank account access was not meant to be in this comment?

i felt a lot more comfortable when the giant worms were in australia—now i know they're literally in my backyard.

I was, thanks for clarifying.

And not gigantic. These headlines are becoming tiresome.

It's gigantic relative what you'd expect for predators at the time, is the point.

Yes, 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.

Clearly you have been watching too much Dune.

That'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.

Right? I was expecting something akin to an ALASKAN BULL WORM

(viz. spongebob)

Can you explain to non English speaker?

> more than half a billion years old

For a moment I got scared that it is alive and is half a billion years old.

Shai Hulud?

whoever controls the spice...

My immediate question was "how giant?"

Turns out 30 cm.

‘Giant’

...for a worm.

The 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.

Can you provide more details on these 50m worms. How girthy are they?

This 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

Relative to modern worms, pretty big. Relative to other Cambrian fauna, pretty big (I think?). Relative to those worms from Tremors, pathetic.

Shai Hulud

Bless the maker and his water

More like Shai Huludsquee.

Disappointed no one has mentioned Dune here yet

Oh but they did and you missed it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38866166

I think HN prefers Arrakis ;)

Also scroll down a bit, there were a few before your comment .

"Goa'uld found under icecap"

I wouldn’t trust that guy holding the “fossil” plate now.

No, "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...).

One 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.

The spice must flow.

The 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...

Have you tried Spore?

That's what Spore promised but did not deliver.

Although 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

That 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.

If 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.

The 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

Having gotten into the Hollow Knight series recently, this speaks to me.

We have wormsign

>> "and growing to more than 30cm in length"

I'd fight one.

I 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.

Hopefully I would at least be allowed gloves or what I can find on the ground. Did we have trees and sticks then?

No, it's roughly 200 million years too early for woody plants. Rocks aplenty, though.

It is mad to think we had animals before we had trees (even if the animals were in the sea).

Is 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.

Maybe 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)

The didn’t state any upper bound for the “more than 30 cm”.

>> 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.

> 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".

Lol 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.

> Queue

(nitpick) Correctly spelled but wrong word - you're actually looking for "cue".

Maybe evolution just has a full backlog this sprint.

I'm going to keep mixing this up regularly until I change careers.

The 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.

The biggest animal kingdom danger to humans is humans.

Not mosquitos?

you had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

If our creation ends up lasting longer, we still win over those worms :)

I'm imagining a not-so-distant future where LLM's start to need daycare services and places for them to go and hang out at, social media sites. An occupied LLM is less likely to become skynet maybe? :)

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