Meet Our Distinguished Worm

New Zealand’s velvet worm shares the title of a new book by British palaeontologist and writer Richard Fortey. Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms describes “the distinguished groups of organisms that are still recognizable and thriving after millions and millions of years.” Fortey travels to a damp forest in New Zealand to find the velvet worm. “Squishy rather than velvety, it comes from an even lower branch of the evolutionary tree than the horseshoe crab,” New York Times’ reviewer Constance Casey writes. “At least 300 million years ago, this worm’s ancestors emerged from the sea onto the land.”