Millions of years ago, giant predatory worms as long as an adult human terrorized the ocean. The fearsome creatures hid under the sea floor, waiting to seize unwitting prey with their slicing jaws and drag them underground to be consumed — like they do today, recently discovered fossils suggest.
The fossils are “very, very distinctive,” said Shahin Dashtgard, a professor of earth sciences at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., who co-authored a new study describing them.
“They’re like nothing we’ve ever seen before in the rock record.”
The fossil burrow opening, left, is compared to a modern Bobbit worm burrow opening. The researchers found that the fossil and modern burrows were similar. (Paleoenvironntal Sediment Laboratory/National Taiwan University, Chutinun Mora)
Unlike traditional fossils that are usually formed from the hard parts of an animal’s body, such as its bones or shell, the worm fossils are “trace fossils” consisting of non-biological traces such as footprints or, in this case, a burrow. The fossils are described in a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Dashtgard noted that because worms have soft bodies, they’re rarely fossilized.
“So, the burrows they make is really the only record we have of what the ecosystem would look like and how diverse the ecosystem was.”
Evoke the monsters of science fiction
The researchers propose that the ancient worm was similar to the modern-day Bobbit worm or sand striker, a marine predator that lives in tropical and subtropical seas in the Indo-Pacific Region and grows up to three metres long. It hides in underground burrows with just its head exposed, striking and grabbing prey, such as fish or shellfish with sharp, scissor-like jaws and dragging them into its burrow.
Bobbit worms are named for the slicing ability of their jaws, which was likened to the slicing that abused wife Lorena Bobbit did to remove her husband’s penis in 1989. They have also been compared to sand crawling monsters in science fiction worlds such as Star Wars, Dune and Tremors.
But because they’re soft, worms are rarely found in the fossil record.
That’s why researchers have begun looking for trace fossils of soft-bodied marine animals. Ludvig Löwemark, a professor of geosciences at National Taiwan University and Masakazu Nara, a professor of biological sciences at Kochi University in Japan, two co-authors of the study, were looking for trace fossils of another ancient animal when they came across something unusual in a 20 million-year-old sandstone formation in Taiwan.
Figuring out what it was became the project of Yu Yen Pan, a master’s student working with Löwemark who is now a PhD student at Simon Fraser University.
An animation shows how the trace fossil would have formed. (Yu Yen Pan)
Key piece of the puzzle
The rock where the fossils were originally found, Badouzi promontory, was an ancient continental shelf about 30 or 40 metres below the surface of the ocean, said Pan. It was likely similar to the environment found off the coast of Taiwan today. Other fossil evidence shows that it was likely a coral reef populated by animals such as stingrays and other fish, sea urchins and crustaceans such as shrimp and lobsters.
The first fossils were mostly fragments left behind by erosion, so the researchers decided to look for similar fossils in another part of the same rock layer some distance away in an area called Yehliu Geopark.
It wasn’t long before Löwemark called Pan over. He had found a complete fossil, starting with a funnel at the top that narrows to a cylindrical tube about three centimetres in diameter, descending straight into the ground for 70 or 80 centimetres, before bending horizontally into an L-shape, reaching a total length of about two metres
“We were super excited,” Pan recalled. “This really could help us to connect the puzzle together and make the story more complete.”
The top part of the fossil burrow, seen from the side, is funnel shaped, with feathery lines from the disturbance of the soil that’s thought to be caused by the worm pulling prey into the burrow. (Paleoenvironntal Sediment Laboratory/National Taiwan University)
In total, the researchers found 319 fossil specimens at the two sites. A chemical analysis of the fossils found they were high in iron, which is typical of burrows made by soft-bodied animals. That’s because they tend to stabilize their burrows with mucus that attracts microbes that enrich the sediment with iron.
The fact that the tunnel was L-shaped also suggested that it was made by a soft-bodied animal, as such animals can’t dig too deep before the ground gets too hard and compacted for them to continue, and they need to start digging horizontally.
The burrows were different in size and shape from burrows made from other animals, such as eels or razor clams.
But when the researchers compared the fossil burrows to the burrows of modern Bobbit worms, which inhabit modern ecosystems not much different from those that the fossil was found in, they appeared very similar.
Dashtgard suggests that means the worms have been living in a similar environment for quite a long time — about 20 million years.
‘Feathery footprint’ from Taiwan
The researchers named their new fossil Pennichnus formosae. The first part of the name refers to the feathery (“penna” in Latin) “footprint” (“ichnus” in Latin) left in the top “funnel” of the burrow by the way the sediments were disturbed when the animal pulled its prey inside. “Formosae” after Formosa, a former name for Taiwan, honours the place it was found,
Pan said the fossil is notable because it provides clues about hunting behaviour of an ancient invertebrate, something that is quite rare.
The study coauthors included, from left, Shahin Dashtgard, Ludvig Lowemark, Yu Yen Pan and Masakazu Nara, standing on right. (Paleoenvironmental Sediment Laboratory/National Taiwan University)
David Rudkin was one of the researchers who studied the Ontario Bobbit worm jaw fossils but was not involved in the trace fossil study. Rudkin, a retired assistant curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and a retired lecturer at the University of Toronto, said while he isn’t an expert in trace fossils, he found the interpretation in the new study “pretty convincing.”
“The kicker, of course, would be finding a direct association in the form of either ‘jaw’ elements or soft-body bits within the burrows, left after the animal died in place,” he said in an email.
Unfortunately, the conditions that preserve burrows and those that preserve bodies tend to be quite different, so they’re rarely found together, he said.
“Under the circumstances,” he said, “I think the authors have done a nice job of making the case for these being Bobbit burrows!”
This is an artistic reconstruction of Websteroprion amrstrongi, a Bobbit worm that lived 400 million years ago in Ontario. Its fossil jaws were discovered and reported by a team of researchers that included David Rudkin at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. (James Ormiston)
More burrows likely to be found
Murray Gingras is professor at the University of Alberta who studies traces made by modern animals and compares them to the fossil record. He wasn’t involved in the new study but has gone to Australia to study the burrows of modern Bobbit worms as part of his own research.
One challenge with trace fossils, he said, is that many animals can make very similar traces and figuring out which one any given trace came from requires some interpretation. But in this case, he thinks the researchers’ interpretation is reasonable and well argued.
“I think it’s a fun discovery,” he said.
He said he’s surprised such fossil burrows haven’t been found before given how widespread Bobbit worms are and how conspicuous their burrows are.
He suspects that many more will be found now that other researchers know what to look for, and that will help uncover the animals’ movements and distribution over the past 20 million years.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer’s software code—isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification had worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.
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Osoyoos commuters can celebrate Earth Day as the Town joins in on a national commuter challenge known as “Leg Day,” entering a chance to win sustainable transportation prizes.
The challenge, from Earth Day Canada, is to record 10 sustainable commutes taken without a car.
“Cars are one of the biggest contributors to gas emissions in Canada,” reads an Earth Day Canada statement. “That’s why, Earth Day Canada is launching the national Earth Day is Leg Day Challenge.”
So far, over 42.000 people have participated in the Leg Day challenge.
Participants could win an iGo electric bike, public transportation for a year, or a gym membership.
The Town of Osoyoos put out a message Monday promoting joining the national program.
For more information on the Leg Day challenge click here.
Verticillium wilt is a problem for a lot of crops in Manitoba, including canola, sunflowers and alfalfa.
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In potatoes, the fungus Verticillium dahlia is the main cause of potato early die complex. In a 2021 interview with the Co-operator, Mario Tenuta, University of Manitoba soil scientist and main investigator with the Canadian Potato Early Dying Network, suggested the condition can cause yield loss of five to 20 per cent. Other research from the U.S. puts that number as high as 50 per cent.
It also becomes a marketing issue when stunted spuds fall short of processor preferences.
Verticillium in potatoes can significantly reduce yield and, being soil-borne, is difficult to manage.
Preliminary research results suggest earlier planting of risk-prone fields could reduce losses, in part due to colder soil temperatures earlier in the season.
Unlike other potato fungal issues that can be addressed with foliar fungicide, verticillium hides in the soil.
“Commonly we use soil fumigation and that’s very expensive,” said Julie Pasche, plant pathologist with North Dakota State University.
There are options. In 2017, labels expanded for the fungicide Aprovia, Syngenta’s broad-spectrum answer for leaf spots or powdery mildews in various horticulture crops. In-furrow verticillium suppression for potatoes was added to the label.
There has also been interest in biofumigation. Mustard has been tagged as a potential companion crop for potatoes, thanks to its production of glucosinolate and the pathogen- and pest-inhibiting substance isothiocyanate.
Last fall, producers heard that a new, sterile mustard variety specifically designed for biofumigation had been cleared for sale in Canada, although seed supplies for 2024 are expected to be slim. AAC Guard was specifically noted for its effectiveness against verticillium wilt.
Timing is everything
Researchers at NDSU want to study the advantage of natural plant growth patterns.
“What we’d like to look at are other things we can do differently, like verticillium fertility management and water management, as well as some other areas and how they may be affected by planting date,” Pasche said.
The idea is to find a chink in the fungus’s life cycle.
Verticillium infects roots in the spring. From there, it colonizes the plant, moving through the root vascular tissue and into the stem. This is the cause of in-season vegetative wilting, Pasche noted.
As it progresses, plant cells die, leaving behind tell-tale black dots on dead tissue. Magnification of those dots reveals what look like dark bunches of grapes — tiny spheres containing melanized hyphae, a resting form of the fungus called microsclerotia.
The dark colour comes from melanin, the same pigment found in human skin. This pigmentation protects the microsclerotia from ultraviolet light.
