After Centuries of Searching, Scientists Finally Find the Mysterious Giant Shipworm Alive
The three-foot long creature has long eluded scientists, but they finally got a closer look
By Jason Daley
The giant shipworm, Kuphus polythalamia, is not new to science. As Ben Guarino at The Washington Post reports, even Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, was aware of this three-foot-long bivalve back in the 1700s. But no one had actually seen it still alive. Researchers studied the creature from fragments of its casing and the mushy dead bivalve bodies that had washed ashore.
“It’s sort of the unicorn of mollusks,†Margo Haygood, marine microbiologist at the University of Utah tells Guarino.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/giant-shipworm-finally-found-after-180962944/#QukwLEZof3Amc11L.99
