A team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in the USA, has found an exceptionally well-preserved primitive armored worm that lived during the Cambrian, about 530 million years ago .
According to these experts in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports , these animals were a few millimeters long and presented certain anatomical peculiarities, such as the segmented body, which have led them to suspect that they were closely related to the ancestors of the current quinorhincs. , of which about 240 species survive.
These tiny marine invertebrates, known as mud dragons, also have a trunk with numerous segments and are equipped with an exoskeleton, like insects or spiders. In fact, you are related to arthropods, although they do not have jointed legs. The scientists emphasize that their discovery fills an important gap in the fossil record of the phylum of the aforementioned quinorhincs. And it is that, until now, the specimens that have appeared of this new species, called Eokinorhynchus rarus – the first was found in 2013, in Nanjiang (China) -, were not in very good condition.
On the contrary, the last specimen, examined by computerized microtomography by these experts in geosciences and paleobiology, has allowed us to know its morphology much better. Thus, it has been observed that his body was organized in three parts : the head, provided with a cone-shaped toothed mouth, the neck, and the trunk, which includes eleven segments.
Scientists believe that the analysis of this last characteristic will allow them to shed some light on the development of current animals that, like them, have a segmented body.
