2024-09-19 10:17:36
An international team of scientists has discovered in northern Greenland the fossil of a ‘giant’ predatory worm measuring about 30 centimetres that inhabited the oceans at least 518 million years ago, reports the University of Bristol in England.
Experts have named this enormous specimen for its time – found in the Sirius Passet fossil site from the Lower Cambrian in the Nordic country – ‘Timorebestia koprii’, combining ‘terrifying beast’ in Latin and Kopri or the Korean Polar Research Institute, which participated in the study.
The authors of the paper, published in the journal Science Advances, claim that these large worms could be “among the first carnivorous animals to colonize the water column more than 518 million years ago,” which means that they belong to an ancient dynasty of predators that was previously unknown.
According to the remains found, the Timorebeast had fins on both sides of the body, long antennae, huge jaw structures in the mouth and grew to more than 30 centimeters long, making them “one of the largest swimming animals of the Early Cambrian.”
Dominant predators
Jakob Vinther, from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, points out that until now it has been thought that “early arthropods were the dominant predators during the Cambrian, such as the (extinct) anomalocaridids”, which resemble shrimps.
However, this team points out that the Timorebestia is “a distant, but also close, relative of the living arrow worms or chaetognaths” – today small oceanic predators that feed on zooplankton – which are one of the oldest animal fossils from the Cambrian period.
While arthropods appear in the fossil record between 521 and 529 million years ago, arrowheads date back at least 538 million years, Vinther says.
“Both arrowworms and the more primitive Timorebeast were swimming predators. We can therefore assume that they were, in all likelihood, the predators that dominated the oceans before arthropods took off,” he says.
Other remains in the digestive system
Inside the fossilized digestive system of Timorebeast, researchers found remains of a common swimming arthropod called Isoxys.
“Our research shows that these ancient ocean ecosystems were quite complex, with a food chain that allowed for multiple levels of predators,” Vinther writes.
“The Timorebeasts were giants of their time and would have been near the top of the food chain,” making them equivalent in importance to “some of the major carnivores of modern oceans, such as sharks and seals,” he says.