Karma Nanglu

We have fossils as old as about 515, 516 million years old that have evidence of parasites on them.

And these are kind of small, worm-like animals building tubes on top of these shelled creatures called brachiopods in order to basically steal the food that they're drawing into their mouths.

They had this weird marking on them.

It looked pretty much like a perfect sort of stylized question mark.

We had no explanation at the time for what this thing could possibly be.

So it just sort of sat there in the back of our minds, kind of like burrowing away at them for, you know, over the course of maybe like two, three years since we first found them.

And we kept on shelving it because we weren't sure what it was, but we knew we'd come back to it because it was super interesting.

Yeah, there's tons of different fossil parasite worms.

There are actually fossils of insects in amber.

I think specifically a group of insects called planthoppers.

And we can actually see nematodes emerging from them in this amber fossil.

So we have not just the host, we also have the parasite.

And in fact, the parasite is actually leaving the body.

It looks basically like if you took a photo of that happening in a modern environment.

Yeah, we were stewing on this for about two, three years.

So once in a while, I would basically go back to the paper or go back to those photos, rather, and do a bit of a search.

And I feel like I was just basically like kind of like like an investigation.

You're knocking off lists of lists of animals or lists of suspects.

Exactly.

Suspects.