Traces of prehistoric giant worm found in Spain

Adam Khor

Well, giant for what we usually think of as "normal" worms.

This creature lived 472 million years ago. Article is in Spanish so I've translated the juicy parts for you guys:

"The traces left by a sea worm "Paleoficus tubularis", which inhabited Earth 472 million years ago, have been located in the Cabañeros National Park. It is the biggest and oldest worm ever found in the planet, the result of the work of a group of Spanish researchers led by Juan Carlos Gutierrez-Marco, a geopaleontologist from the CSIC.
The traces left by the specimen, which according to the researchers was about one meter long and 15 to 20 cm girth, was found during last year's expedition in a stone slab, almost vertical, in the edge of a hiking road inside the park.
But it was this year when the team (...) could study the tunnels which are five meters long (...) Gutierrez-Marco has said that "it is important to have these casts of the fossilized trackways because its where these animals left clues to their behavior, they are life clues, unlike bones which are death clues".
(...) Gutierrez-Marco comments that they won´t be able to find out exactly what the giant specimen looked like since it was a soft bodied organism "but we do know they were digging horizontal tunnels in the sea bottom, near the continent of Gondwana, and that they lived there. They were galleries which were covered on mucus on the inside and this is what made them harden and prevented them from collapsing (...) They were probably cold waters due to their proximity to the South Pole. "When animals live in low temperatures they tend to grow bigger and this could explain its giantism, although this can´t be proven".

The article is illustrated by this picture which actually depicts the Mongolian death worm, a cryptid.

Of course, anyone into freaky modern day creatures knows that a one meter worm is not a giant.

There are giant marine worms such as the bobbit worm which can grow up to three meters long and is predatory:



Tube worms can reach similar lengths:



Some Eunicidae worms can grow to six meters long, and of course, how to forget Linneus longissimus which can reach 55 meters long (although it's quite thin):



As for land worms...

Owryan

Thanks, now I 'll be having nightmares bout them big f**kers hunting me down in revenge for their relatives I used as fishing bait !!