Biologists name new species of branching worm after legendary King Ghidorah - fivenewscrypto
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jeudi 27 janvier 2022

Biologists name new species of branching worm after legendary King Ghidorah

Biologists name new species of branching worm after legendary King Ghidorah
jeudi 27 janvier 2022
(left) Biologists have named a newly discovered species of branching worm, <em>Ramisyllis kingghidorahin</em>, after Godzilla's nemesis. (right) Fragment of one specimen of the branching worm.

Enlarge / (left) Biologists have named a newly discovered species of branching worm, Ramisyllis kingghidorahin, after Godzilla's nemesis. (right) Fragment of one specimen of the branching worm. (credit: M.T. Aguado)

In the 2019 blockbuster film, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, everyone's favorite kaiju, Godzilla, battled another titan named King Ghidorah, a monster notable for its three heads. Now biologists have discovered a new species of marine worm that has one head but a body that can branch out into several posterior ends, according to a recent paper published in the journal Organisms Diversity & Evolution. So naturally the biologists named the new species after Godzilla's legendary adversary: Ramisyllis kingghidorahi.

"King Ghidorah is a branching fictitious animal that can regenerate its lost ends, so we thought this was an appropriate name for the new species of branching worm," said co-author M. Teresa Aguado of the University of Göttingen. In fact, the director of the first Ghidorah-centric feature film in 1964, Ishiro Honda, said his monster was a modern take on a legendary eight-headed and eight-tailed dragon/serpent in Japanese folklore called Yamata no Orochi.

According to Aguado and her co-authors, only two other species of these rare branching worms have been discovered. Back in 1879, an amateur naturalist named Charles Macintosh reported the discovery of a "remarkably branched Syllid" (dubbed Syllis ramosa). The creature was found lurking inside a glass sea sponge in the Philippines during the Challenger natural history expedition. Syllis ramosa was the first known instance of an annelid species with a "randomly branching asymmetrical body."

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