Smiling Worm Facts - Decades after its fossils left scientists baffled, a new study has recently solved the mysterious case of the odd ancient worm Hallucigenia or better known as the "smiling worm."

Like Us on Facebook

The Hallucigenia has been first identified by scientists back in the '70s. However, its bizarre anatomy gave experts a hard time figuring out which end of the smiling worm was its head and which was the tail. But thanks to a new study of Hallucigenia fossils published on the journal Nature, researchers were able to shed some new insight on its primitive mouthparts.

"With the new description, you can imagine Hallucigenia looking a bit like a caterpillar but with really long, flimsy, extensible legs, and these pairs of conical spines running along its back," England's University of Cambridge paleontologist and lead study author Dr. Martin Smith said. "So it sort of looks like a twig with loads of sticks coming out of it."

As researchers finally solved the long-drawn-out mystery about the Hallucigenia worm, we are sharing 5 interesting things to know about this tiny, spiky creature called as smiling worm.

1. Hallucigenia worms were tiny marine worms, usually measuring between 10 to 15 millimeters in length. These strange smiling worms emerged during the Cambrian Explosion. According to The Telegraph, the Cambrian era is a the first Paleozoic Era (the "time of ancient life") geological time period of rapid evolutionary development that began almost 500 million years ago, when most major animal groups first emerge in the fossil record.

2. Hallucigenia worm has a circular "grinning" mouth lined with teeth, CBS News revealed. This toothy ring may be the connection that links diverse creatures such as spiders, nematode worms, mud-dwelling Loricifera, phallus-shaped "penis worms" and teeny-tiny tardigrades or water bears, which are cute and almost indestructible micro animals.

3. These Smiling worms (Hallucigenia sparsa) are ancestors of modern-day velvet worms, Live Science noted. While the Hallucigenia worms have long, wormy body with spines on top and 10 pairs of spindly legs ending in claws and three pairs of tentacles along its neck, the velvet worms are strange, sluglike creatures with centipede-style legs.

4. The analysis of its 500-million-year-old fossil also suggests that Hallucigenia must have had a small mouth cavity in front of a ring of teeth to suck food into its throat. As per Huffington Post, the throat would have been lined with tiny needlelike teeth to push the food into the stomach.

5. The fossils of the smiling worms originated in the Burgess Shale of Yoho National Park in western Canada, one of the world's richest sources of fossils from the Cambrian period.

TagsSmiling Worm, Science, discovery, Hallucigenia