Undersea of a giant worm attacking marine life passed by Taiwanese fossils 20 years ago.
Researchers believe that a 2-meter-long burrow found in ancient seawater once housed a prehistoric hunter that came out of the shore and dragged unsuspecting animals down into its soil.
This animal may be similar to today’s ferocious “Bobbit Worms” that passers-by with antennae in the wake of sandy seafloor burrows. Despite having a soft body, the worm has sharp and powerful jaws that can cut a fish in two.
“After the 20th year, it is not possible to say that this bit bit was created by the ancestor of a worm or any other predatory worm that acted more or less the same way,” said Professor Ludwig Lovemark, a sedimentologist at National Taiwan University. “There’s a big difference in the behavior of the Bob bit worm, but it looks very similar to a shallow water worm that reaches out, catches a fish and pulls it down.”
Bobbit worms, or Eunice Aphrodite, Take their names from the John and Lorena Bobbitt case, in which the latter – after many years of physical and sexual abuse – cut off the penis of the East with a kitchen knife.
Lumark and his colleagues discovered fossil beads and others like them while studying 20 million-year-old siltstone off Taiwan’s northeast coast. Burrows are stronger than mucus and more resilient to the weather, meaning they sometimes outperform the beautiful faces of sandstone.
Scientists were initially made mysterious by the trace fossils, but gradually turned to a potential suspect. At the top of the 3 cm-wide burrows they saw a distinctive pattern that looked like many vertical funnels at the top of each other. This gave the chair a feathery appearance in cross-section.
Rejecting other burial creatures such as shrimp, and the marks left by stingers that explode in a plane with a water jet to reveal prey, the researchers concluded that the bitworm’s feathered entrance was caused by a bitworm-like prey strategy.
When the worm pulls down its prey, the top of the burrow breaks and the worm has to rebuild it before attacking in its next meal. “This results in a stack of cone-in-cone formations made up of ‘feathers’ around the top of the tube,” Lewmark said.
Writing in the Journal of Scientific Reports, the researchers described 31 such shallow water burrows preserved in the 20-year-old sandstone at Yahliu Geopark and in the nearby Bauuzi Promontory, suggesting that the animal was colonized along the local coast. Trace fossil burrows, named Penichenus formose, There is also a vert for the top meter, then run horizontally for another meter or so, probably because it is difficult to penetrate deep deep silt, and there the water is less oxygenated. Bobbit worms breathe by absorbing oxygen oxygen through their skin.
Researchers had hoped that the burrows may have contained fossil remains of prey or their remains, but they have yet to find any. One reason, boring worms often inject their feces into the water and keep it away, spreading the bone fragments far and wide, Lewmark said.
Lumarck has a dream port one day to study bobbit worms in the wild. “They are impressive animals,” he said. “You don’t want to ask for a snorkel too close if you find one.”
