Websteroprion armstrongi was a hulking worm, possibly over a meter in length, with jaws unmatched among animals of its kind . It lived in the Palezoic seas 400 million years ago, and the fossil remains of its jaws have been kept since the mid-1990s, unidentified, on the shelves of the Royal Ontario Museum (Canada). Now, an international team of scientists has just presented this monstrous polychaete, ancestor of earthworms and leeches , in Scientific Reports magazine.
The anatomical details of the new species are reminiscent of a fearsome current annelid: the Bobbit worm ( Eunice aphroditois ). This opportunistic animal of up to three meters in length darts at full speed with its sharp teeth on fish, octopus and squid and drags them to its burrow. This is how possibly Websteroprion armstrongi , which had two-centimeter jaws, would also act. It must be taken into account that, usually, this type of fossil does not exceed a few millimeters in length and can only be studied under a microscope.
As explained by Mats Eriksson, from the University of Lund (Sweden) and the main author of the work, gigantism is an unusual evolutionary adaptation among marine worms and that had not been observed before in fossil species, hence the importance of the discovery.
The name of the new Paleozoic worm, Websteroprion armstrongi , is a tribute to Alex Webster, a bass ‘giant’ who plays in the heavy metal group Cannibal Corpse, and Derek K. Armstrong, the Canadian scientist who collected the fossils in 1994.
Image: artist’s recreation of the Websteroprion armstrongi worm attacking a fish. Credit: James Ormiston.
