A muscly fossil fireworm has been named Rollinschaeta myoplena, in honour of Henry Rollins, a spoken word artist and the muscular former frontman of hardcore punk band Black Flag.

The fossil worm, discovered by scientists from the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum, is a polychaete annelid, which is a marine relative of earthworms and leeches. Details of the team’s findings are published this week in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

While polychaetes are entirely soft bodied and seldom occur as fossils, some remarkable details of such creatures can be preserved when conditions are right. This was the case of Rollinschaeta, which is preserved mostly as three dimensional muscle tissue, according to the team.

“Fossil muscle tissue is rare and usually not described in any detail by palaeontologists, but our discovery highlights that soft tissues preserved in fossils can offer details approaching what we can observe in living organisms,” says Bristol PhD student Luke Parry, one of the researchers who made the discovery.

The researchers were able to identify different muscle groups in Rollinschaeta as the creature’s muscles were replicated by the mineral apatite soon after its death. Using CT scanning, the scientists investigated the three dimensional arrangement of muscles in living annelids to compare them with Rollinschaeta.

According to the team, they were surprised to find that it was possible to determine, based only on its muscles, that Rollinschaeta is a member of the fireworms. Characterised by abundant stinging bristles from which they get their name, living representatives of these creatures are common predators on coral reefs.

While carrying out the research, the team informally referred to the creature as ‘the muscle worm’ due to its preservation in almost pure muscle, says Dr Jakob Vinther of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, a co-author of the study.

Fireworms are active during the daytime on coral reefs and other environments with strong currents which make them much more muscular compared to most other bristle worms, Vinther explains.

This is the first time that any fossil has been identified by its muscle anatomy, according to Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum, another co-author of the study. “It’s probably more of a curiosity due to the exceptional composition and muscularity of this fireworm rather than something we might expect to turn up in the fossil record a lot. However, it does show that when muscles get preserved, we can get a lot of information about extinct animals from them,” he says.

In June 2015, researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered a new species of ‘super-armoured’ worm, a bizarre, spike-covered creature that ate by filtering nutrients out of seawater with its feather-like front legs. The creature, which lived about half a billion years ago, was one of the first animals on Earth to develop armour to protect itself from predators and to use such a specialised mode of feeding.

The creature, belonging to a poorly understood group of early animals, is also a prime example of the broad variety of form and function seen in the early evolutionary history of a modern group of animals that are homogenous, according to the team of paleontologists.

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