The worms that changed the world
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In the shallow waters of a sea in northern China 500 million years ago, a dazzling new array of creatures was swimming: part of an explosion of animal diversity that would forever change the course of life on Earth. Quietly, in the seabed beneath them, another revolution was underway. Close-up view of fossilized branching burrows preserved in rock formed from an ancient seabed in what is now northern China [Credit: University of Saskatchewan] For perhaps the first time, tiny creatures were pushing their way through the sediment to create complex mazes of burrows, slowly but profoundly altering the environment around them. Evidence of these early "ecosystem engineers" was published in Scientific Reports by researchers from the University of Saskatchewan (USA) and Henan Polytechnic University in China. The floors of Earth's ancient oceans looked very different than they do today, said Luis Buatois, a professor in the US Department of Geological Sciences and one of the st