Description

Middle Cretaceous (Cenomanian)
Hajoula, Lebanon

40mm worm on 80mm slab.

Here is an unidentified marine worm from around the mid-point of the Cretaceous Period.  There are not a lot of Cretaceous sites that preserve soft-bodied animals.  It’s possible this worm is new to science. Click the bottom image to see a video of what these things do.

Across geologic time, worms have been quite diverse, suffering through extinctions minor and major since at least the Early Cambrian.  Scientists have recognized that some of them are only distantly related – too distant for ancestry.com to be much help.