[HN Gopher] 30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old ...
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30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in
Greenland
Author : clouddrover
Score : 123 points
Date : 2024-01-04 11:57 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bristol.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bristol.ac.uk)
| jjgreen wrote:
| "Fossils of ..." in case you were as scared as me
| ReptileMan wrote:
| I was just looking at the headline and "That is a good
| beginning of a horror movie"
| raverbashing wrote:
| Or a techno-distopian space sci-fi movie ;)
| gilleain wrote:
| So Tremors, then?
| happosai wrote:
| This is the episode "ice" from x-files.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Also _relatively_ giant:
|
| > growing to more than 30cm in length
| nathancahill wrote:
| This centipede is a predator.
| mccrory wrote:
| Centipede https://g.co/kgs/zUznwnH
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| 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.
| gilleain wrote:
| Bigger : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchaetus_rappi
| can grow to 6.7m !
| jjgreen wrote:
| Holy crap: https://featuredcreature.com/hide-yo-kids-
| hide-yo-wife-there...
| aftoprokrustes wrote:
| 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 acceder a vos comptes Caisse d'Epargne.
| Si vous n'etes pas a 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| Looks like you accidentally pasted the content of what
| seems like an SMS with a login code. I'd delete that ;-)
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| >the biggest knRecopiez le code 53587468 pour acceder a
| vos comptes Caisse d'Epargne. Si vous n'etes pas a
| 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
| eino wrote:
| I take your (or the worm's) bank account access was not
| meant to be in this comment?
| notnmeyer wrote:
| i felt a lot more comfortable when the giant worms were in
| australia--now i know they're literally in my backyard.
| vinu76jsr wrote:
| I was, thanks for clarifying.
| gumballindie wrote:
| And not gigantic. These headlines are becoming tiresome.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It's gigantic relative what you'd expect for predators at the
| time, is the point.
| gumballindie wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Clearly you have been watching too much Dune.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| 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.
| rvbissell wrote:
| Right? I was expecting something akin to an ALASKAN BULL WORM
|
| (viz. spongebob)
| Raed667 wrote:
| Shai Hulud
| hyperific wrote:
| Bless the maker and his water
| hasoleju wrote:
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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.
| laszlojamf wrote:
| 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?
| systems_glitch wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A fantastic example of this is 'the petrified forest'.
|
| https://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm
|
| Straight from the Triassic.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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...
| guerrilla wrote:
| Have you tried Spore?
| ganzuul wrote:
| That's what Spore promised but did not deliver.
| digging wrote:
| 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
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| gadders wrote:
| >> "and growing to more than 30cm in length"
|
| I'd fight one.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| gadders wrote:
| Hopefully I would at least be allowed gloves or what I can
| find on the ground. Did we have trees and sticks then?
| digging wrote:
| No, it's roughly 200 million years too early for woody
| plants. Rocks aplenty, though.
| gadders wrote:
| It is mad to think we had animals before we had trees
| (even if the animals were in the sea).
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| flipgimble wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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
| wiredfool wrote:
| Giant worms are a thing:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Gippsland_earthworm
| hyperific wrote:
| I should have known it'd be Australian.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| haha, my thoughts exactly. went scanning through the
| wikipedia and saw it was austrailian, and thought, "oh, that
| makes sense".
| monkeydreams wrote:
| Australian giant earthworms are larger than this by far.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Scarier ones exist:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois
|
| They're terrifying in action:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7ByiYbCYM
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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.
| yreg wrote:
| > 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
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| This needs it's own submission.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Well, another reminder that monsters do in fact exist.
|
| Worth its own HN submission?
| wharvle wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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.
| gamacodre wrote:
| Those are more difficult, but we're in the process of
| killing them off too.
|
| As usual, without much regard to consequences.
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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_
| s0rce wrote:
| invisibly tiny bacteria were also very likely to kill
| you, and still often do
| yreg wrote:
| 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
| kruuuder wrote:
| Truly impressive images, but the foley sounds and music in
| that video are so idiotic.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Ah, graboids.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Is that of the same genus as the Sarlacc?
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yes, Cinematicus genus. ;-)
| derbOac wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| Almost as bad as giant isopods. I'm fairly certain HP
| Lovecraft saw one and dreamed up the Deep One.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| The Wikipedia photograph is both spectacular, scary and very
| alien (to us terrestrial life-forms): https://upload.wikimedi
| a.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Eunice_a...
|
| I can see where sci-fi/horror film-makers get their
| inspiration.
| dekhn wrote:
| oh my god, that birefringence is beautiful.
| s0rce wrote:
| I think its iridescence not birefringence, still pretty
| none the less
| pvaldes wrote:
| If you like Eunice you'll love its 400 million years old
| ancestor from Canada, Websteroprion
| dtgriscom wrote:
| 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.
| alberto_ol wrote:
| non mobile link:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Gippsland_earthworm
| guerrilla wrote:
| That's pretty gross, but kind of what you'd expect>
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WVrtABlU4
| monkeydreams wrote:
| 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.
| boiler_up800 wrote:
| Having gotten into the Hollow Knight series recently, this speaks
| to me.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Disappointed no one has mentioned Dune here yet
| sideshowb wrote:
| Oh but they did and you missed it
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38866166
| tizio13 wrote:
| I think HN prefers Arrakis ;)
|
| Also scroll down a bit, there were a few before your comment .
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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)
| dsign wrote:
| >> 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| digging wrote:
| > Queue
|
| (nitpick) Correctly spelled but wrong word - you're actually
| looking for "cue".
| solardev wrote:
| Maybe evolution just has a full backlog this sprint.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The biggest animal kingdom danger to humans is humans.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Not mosquitos?
| meehai wrote:
| you had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
| manojlds wrote:
| If our creation ends up lasting longer, we still win over those
| worms :)
| justsomeoldguy wrote:
| 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? :)
| yewenjie wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Shai Hulud?
| justsomeoldguy wrote:
| whoever controls the spice...
| grahamlee wrote:
| The spice must flow.
| yreg wrote:
| My immediate question was "how giant?"
|
| Turns out 30 cm.
| mosselman wrote:
| 'Giant'
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| ...for a worm.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Can you provide more details on these 50m worms. How
| girthy are they?
| yreg wrote:
| 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_aphrodit
| ois#Description
| karaterobot wrote:
| Relative to modern worms, pretty big. Relative to other
| Cambrian fauna, pretty big (I think?). Relative to those worms
| from _Tremors_ , pathetic.
| eggy wrote:
| 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...).
| NikkiA wrote:
| 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.
| aatd86 wrote:
| "Goa'uld found under icecap"
| Apocryphon wrote:
| We have wormsign
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