Researchers Say They ve Found the Ancient Dens of Giant Carnivorous Worms
Illustration: Sassa Chen
Twenty million years ago, the shores of northern Taiwan were sandstone sediments at the bottom of the sea, where 6-foot-long worms lurked in their burrows, waiting for unsuspecting prey to pass overhead. Now, a team of geoscientists have chronicled 319 trace fossils of those carnivorous marine worms, whose dens fossilized in the Miocene muck.
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“In the beginning, we were firmly convinced it was a very fancy shrimp burrow,” Ludvig Löwemark, a sedimentologist at National Taiwan University, said in a video call. “And then, after talking to some other experts, we were leaning towards this bivalve hypothesis. But in the end, we became more and more convinced that it’s actually a bobbit worm that made this trace.”