Not content with a diet of old leaves, some worm species actually eat bones. A new study has now traced the ancient ancestors of these bone-burrowers back through 100 million years of evolution. Deep ...

Bone-eating worms, belonging to the genus Osedax, represent a remarkable example of evolutionary adaptation to ephemeral deep-sea habitats. These specialised annelids colonise the bones of beached ...

Bone worms (the red animals in this picture) were first discovered in the early 2000s, but these animals are believed to have evolved more than 100 million years ago. Adapted from Fujiwara et al. via ...

What happens when the ocean’s giants die? Despite their blubbery bodies, whales eventually sink to the bottom in what are called “whale falls,” becoming an essential source of food, nutrients and ...

Once they knew that the zombie worms existed, scientists started looking for them more. Because they'd been found on bodies of dead animals at the bottom of the sea, they drug whale carcasses and ...

Fallen whale carcasses offer islands of nutrition within an otherwise sparse seafloor, and with help from bone-eating zombie worms, they can sustain an entire ecosystem for decades. But in recent ...

Fussy feeder A hunt for two of the strangest animals that live on the deep sea floor has revealed Antarctic shipwrecks may be incredibly well preserved. The claim follows the discovery by an ...