Also relatively giant:

> growing to more than 30cm in length

So the common earthworm, while usually much smaller, can grow to be 35cm. And from a quick search, the giant Oregon earthworm can grow to be 1.5 meters.

So between the disappointment in the size of 'giant' and the age vs fossil age, this is a pretty big let down of a title.

Now maybe I'm a bit of an idiot for even a second believing any creature could be hundreds of millions of years old - but in the flip side once you take away both of those qualifiers (giant and old) there isn't much story here to be much interest. Or at least not to me.

Let's be fair to the title: 'giant' is in inverted commas, and the article is pretty straight to the point and does not try to drag on the expectation that the worm was 100s of meters long (or alive, but I was expecting a fossil). It does say, however, that it is the biggest knRecopiez le code 53587468 pour accéder à vos comptes Caisse d'Epargne. Si vous n'etes pas à l'origine de cette demande, contactez votre agence.own sea creature at the time: in my book, this is an acceptable definition of a giant.

I was a bit disappointed by the size at first, but I actually found the article very interesting in a lot of aspects: how 30cm was giant at the time, how worms were the dominating family, and yet how similar they were to modern day worms are quite fascinating to me.

Looks like you accidentally pasted the content of what seems like an SMS with a login code. I'd delete that ;-)

Indeed... Too late for that, but it will teach me to proof read every comment before hitting send!

On the positive side, no comment of mine ever generated that much engagement!

>the biggest knRecopiez le code 53587468 pour accéder à vos comptes Caisse d'Epargne. Si vous n'etes pas à l'origine de cette demande, contactez votre agence.own sea creature at the time

I think you accidently hit control-v in the middle of a word

I take your (or the worm's) bank account access was not meant to be in this comment?

Bigger : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchaetus_rappi can grow to 6.7m !

Holy crap: https://featuredcreature.com/hide-yo-kids-hide-yo-wife-there...

i felt a lot more comfortable when the giant worms were in australia—now i know they're literally in my backyard.

This centipede is a predator.

Centipede https://g.co/kgs/zUznwnH

I was just looking at the headline and "That is a good beginning of a horror movie"

Slow worms are bigger than this, also carnivorous (eat slugs and other common garden pests), but are completely harmless to humans, endangered and protected by law, and live human comparable lifespans.

Basically, the headline makes something sound scary when it shouldn't really be.

This is the episode "ice" from x-files.

So Tremors, then?

Or a techno-distopian space sci-fi movie ;)

And not gigantic. These headlines are becoming tiresome.

That's... huge? I don't really see the problem with that. This is from the veryearly Cambrian. The first thing we tentatively assign as an 'animal' (Caveasphaera) came less then 100 million years before it. It comes from the same million year period that featured the first known arthropod (Kylinxia) and absolutely dwarfed that creature. It's 6 times longer.

The size difference between this and what else was around seems pretty close to the difference between you and an elephant.

It's gigantic relative what you'd expect for predators at the time, is the point.

Yes, but casual readers such as myself expected a worm the size of a bus. The title was made to mislead people like into clicking. Why it’s called clickbait.

Clearly you have been watching too much Dune.

Right? I was expecting something akin to an ALASKAN BULL WORM

(viz. spongebob)

Can you explain to non English speaker?

I was, thanks for clarifying.