An armored spiky worm with 30 legs, recently discovered in China, looked like it was straight out of a horror movie. This fearsome creature lived during the Cambrian Period, roughly 518 million years ago.
Collinsium ciliosum was one of the first animals to use specialized limbs to catch prey and evolve armor to protect itself from predators. The creature featured 18 legs in the rear of its body, along with 12 in the front. While the front legs featured feather-like appendages for crawling across the muddy surface of the ocean, the rear legs ended in claws. These were likely used to dig into sponges and other prey, as the front paws scoop out parts of the creature, passing the meat to the hunter's mouth. Today, bamboo shrimp use a similar process for feeding.
The body of C. ciliosum was equipped with up to six-dozen sharp spikes for defense against other animals. This species had a passing resemblance to another bizarre creature of the time, known as Hallucigenia.
"Both creatures are lobopodians, or legged worms, but the Collins' Monster sort of looks like Hallucigenia on steroids. It had much heavier armor protecting its body, with up to five pointy spines per pair of legs, as opposed to Hallucigenia's two," Javier Ortega-Hernández from the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University said.
During the Cambrian explosion, vast numbers of new species came into existence around the globe. Many of the basic forms of life we still see around us today first evolved at this time in the history of the Earth.
Legged worms exist in tropical areas of the world today, and researchers believe C. ciliosum may be an ancestor of modern-day velvet worms, also known as onychophorans.
"Modern velvet worms are all pretty similar in terms of their general body organization and not that exciting in terms of their lifestyle. But during the Cambrian, the distant relatives of velvet worms were stunningly diverse and came in a surprising variety of bizarre shapes and sizes," Ortega-Hernández said.
The newly-discovered fossil shows great detail for a relic this old, revealing structures within the digestive tract of the animal and hairs near the head. The body was likely soft and squishy, necessitating the need for spiky armour.
The vast variety of lifeforms that flourished during the Cambrian Explosion included several other types of animals that were once diverse, although it now seems there is little difference between species.
The name of the worm translates as "Hairy Collins Monster," named after Desmond Collins, a paleontologist who discovered a similar creature in Canada during the 1980s.
Discovery and analysis of Collinsium ciliosum was detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
