Two extinct creatures appeared intact after 400 million years

Two legendary names Excalibur and Shuriken have been given by paleontologists to two creatures from the world lost before the Devonian period of Earth.

According to Live Science, those are two strange worms with an outer shell like extremely thick iron armor, including many stacked arrays of calcite crystals, running along the whole body.

This is a hugely important discovery that opens the window into the Devonian, an era in which the Earth possessed amazing biodiversity, but 75% of species were wiped out after the 365 million mass extinction. last year.

Ancient creature with strange iron armor

According to an article published in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, it was this strange armor that gave scientists the idea of ​​​​two unique names. Excalibur is the name of the legendary sword of King Arthur, mentioned by ancient English legends; while Shuriken is the name of a kind of star-shaped hidden weapon of ancient Japanese ninjas.

The real names of these two worms are Lepidocoleus caliburnus and Lepidocoleus shurikenus.

They have developed strange iron armor to be able to survive on coral reefs in shallow waters that are difficult to be hunted by predators. But unfortunately this armor did not help them escape the great extinction. Using the micro-CT technique, scientists were able to look inside the bodies of two fossils without damaging them, according to Dr. Sarah Jacquer from the University of Missouri (USA).

It is very valuable to find heteromorphic creatures hundreds of millions of years old, preserved intact through such mass extinctions, because it helps scientists add valuable data to the evolutionary map of the Earth. land and better understand biodiversity over time. Many of the creatures of the Devonian period resembled the aliens in the movies.