Zombie worms ate Whale bones

Researchers found bore-holes indicative of Osedax worms in the fossilised flipper of a plesiosaur, and the rib and shell of an ancient sea turtle.This implies that these scavengers, also known as zombie worms, may have influenced which fossils remain today.The research appears in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters.

"Our discovery shows that these bone-eating worms did not co-evolve with whales, but that they also devoured the skeletons of large marine reptiles that dominated oceans in the age of the dinosaurs," said the study's co-author Dr Nicholas Higgs, a researcher at Plymouth University's Marine Institute.

"Osedax, therefore, prevented many skeletons from becoming fossilised, which might hamper our knowledge of these extinct leviathans."This family of worms, first discovered by a deep-sea robot off the California coast in 2002, makes its living from corpses that fall onto the seafloor. They have been found at depths of up to 4km.As adults, the finger-length worms have no mouth or digestive system. Instead they burrow into bones using root-like tendrils, which they use to drink up the fatty molecules they need to survive.It was previously thought that they had co-evolved with whales, whose graveyards they often call homeat the bottom of today's oceans.

But the new research suggests zombie worms must have been around much earlier - 100 million years ago, in fact, when huge plesiosaurs roamed the deep. Then when those huge reptiles died out, 66 million years ago, they made do with sea turtle corpses until whales emerged another 20 million years later.