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A phallus-shaped worm that lived 505 million years ago is heads above the rest—it’s a “missing link” between two lineages of acorn worms, a new study says. Dubbed Spartobranchus tenuis, the odd creature is a type of soft-bodied marine animal that’s rarely preserved in the fossil record. The new specimen was first discovered in the early 1900s in an area called the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich area in Canada‘s Yoho National Park.But the fossil went mostly unnoticed until a few years ago, when evolutionary biologist Jean-Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto “stumbled on drawers full of these worms” at...

Scientists have revealed insights into a peculiar, phallus-shaped creature discovered at a fossil site in Canada. The animal has been identified as Spartobranchus tenuis, a species from the Cambrian period that was previously unknown to science. The odd-looking creature was an ancient relative of acorn worms that exist today, according to researchers. Their study, published in the journal Nature, is the first full description of the prehistoric animal. Remains of soft-bodied worms were found in the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, Canada throughout the last century. But now researchers studying the 505 million years old...