About 500 million years in the past, the Grand Canyon was a terrific sea, and among the many creatures it harbored was a newly found sort of penis worm, armed with many rings of tooth.
Penis worms are marine creatures with a distinctly phallic look. There are greater than 20 identified species dwelling internationally’s oceans at present, in addition to quite a lot of extinct ones, like this new discovery. The researcher who made the discover was looking for fossils within the Grand Canyon and named the species Kraytdraco spectatus in honor of the massive burrowing krayt dragons that seem within the Star Wars universe. Particulars of the invention have been revealed within the journal Science Advances.
The authors imagine that the worm fed utilizing a retractible throat that could possibly be pushed outward, inside out, earlier than being drawn in on itself—just like the finger of a glove being inverted. Lining this throat have been rings and rings of tooth.
Attempting to think about how the traditional worm may need fed, the researchers hypothesize that alongside this proboscis it mixed robust, sharp tooth with extra delicate feathered ones for a two-stage consuming course of. The previous may have been used to select up meals equivalent to algae and microorganisms dispersed within the sand the place the worm would have lived, the latter to filter this meals out of the substrate and chew it. However having solely a fossil to have a look at, and never with the ability to see the worm at work, this stays solely a speculation.
An grownup specimen would have measured about 15 to twenty centimeters lengthy. That is a lot bigger than the species of penis worm that survive at present, which have undergone miniaturization over the millennia and now don’t exceed 2 to three millimeters.
Though the phallic worm monopolized scientists’ consideration with its tooth, fossils of different creatures have been additionally present in the identical expedition. They’re estimated up to now from earlier than the start of the Cambrian interval, roughly 500 million years in the past, thought of by consultants to be the daybreak of complicated animal life. These different creatures, early forms of shrimp and mollusks, are worthwhile as a result of they counsel what the world’s first predators seemed like.
