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Ancient Chinese ‘penis worms’ may have been the first to use their shells to avoid predators
- Scientists found 500-million-year-old fossils in southern China that suggest these sea worms used shells like hermit crabs
- If proven true, it would fundamentally alter our conception of the most vibrant evolutionary period in Earth’s history
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Scientists believe 500-million-year-old fossils found in China from strange-looking sea animals colloquially called “penis worms” might be the earliest known example of a “hermit lifestyle” and may move back the timeline of that evolutionary innovation by hundreds of millions of years.
The discovery in the southwest province Yunnan suggests a fundamental rethinking of the Cambrian Age – one of the most vibrant evolutionary periods in Earth’s history – hinting that it was more predatorial than scientists previously imagined.
“Our find is a bit like finding a cannon in the stone age – clearly predators were more ferocious in Cambrian oceans than we thought, and these early ecosystems were not the gentle paradise that we perhaps used to think,” said Martin Smith, an associate professor in Palaeontology at Durham University and one of the co-authors of the study published on November 8 in Current Biology.
Called priapulans, descendants of these ancient worms still live today, typically around the northernmost parts of the western hemisphere.
The prehistoric version of these creatures had fanged mouths and may have been a mix of predator, scavenger and ocean-floor bottom feeders, said Smith. The hermit strategy suggests they were also prey.
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