Long before anything had legs or lungs, the deep sea was full of worms burrowing into bones and turning death into dinner. A new study shows they’ve been doing this for at least 100 million years—maybe longer.
The modern culprits belong to the Osedax genus, a group of mouthless, gutless worms that rely on bacteria to break down the bones of dead sea creatures. No mouth. No anus. They send root-like filaments into bones and feed from the inside, like something that skipped evolution and went straight to nightmare.
In a study published in PLOS ONE, scientists from University College London and the Natural History Museum used CT scans to examine 130 marine reptile fossils from the Cretaceous period. In six of them, they found burrows—tiny tunnels carved into the bones of long-dead ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs.
These holes resemble those made by modern Osedax species, suggesting this bone-burrowing behavior has been part of the same evolutionary lineage since the time of dinosaurs.
What Are Bone-Eating Worms?
“We haven’t found anything else that makes a similar burrow to these animals,” said lead author Sarah Jamison-Todd. With no contradictory body fossils and nearly identical boring patterns, “we assume they were made by the same or a similar organism.”
The team identified seven new ichnospecies, a term used when scientists name species based on traces, not actual body parts. Some were named after their shape, like Osspecus arboreum, which looks like a tree. Others were named after historical figures, including Osspecus eunicefooteae, honoring Eunice Newton Foote, the first person to experimentally link carbon dioxide to climate change, whose work was ignored for more than a century.
These worms are super creepy, yes—but they’re also essential. They help recycle nutrients in deep-sea ecosystems by devouring whatever’s left after scavengers have stripped away the flesh.
They were carving into skeletons before whales evolved, and some of their marks still show up today. That kind of staying power means they’ve played a much bigger role in the ocean than anyone guessed.
There’s more to nature than blooming flowers and noble predators. Sometimes it’s blind worms with no mouth, living in darkness and drilling into bones.
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