About the length of an iPhone, this is one bizarre Cambrian fossil, at right.
It is a wholly unknown type of sea-worm — and you know these sorts of “time out of mind” discoveries, especially in the mountainous West… fire my imaginings — they are thrilling, indeed.
Here’s the bit:
…When she found the fossil, Rhiannon LaVine, a research associate with the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, was part of a team camping and carrying out fieldwork in the High Creek area of the Spence Shale. This is a geologic formation straddling northern Utah and southern Idaho. Since the 1900s, the area has been famed for its abundance of some 90 species of Cambrian trilobites and soft-bodied fossils….
As the discoverer of the new fossil worm and a co-author on the paper describing it, LaVine bestowed the species with its scientific name: Shaihuludia shurikeni. Shai-Hulud is the indigenous name for the worms on the planet Arrakis in the “Dune” novels by Frank Herbert, while “shuriken” is the Japanese word for throwing star, representing the shape of the blade-like chaetae (chaetae are the stiff bristles that characterize many annelids)….
Now you know… and that’s great STEM content, indeed: immortalized in the history of natural science as the discoverer of a new species. Not entirely coincidentally. . . a decade is by no stretch… a half a billion years, but in some ways… it seems vaguely… alike. Smile.
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