Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer These mysterious worms hunt with an instantaneous net and many do not lay eggs, instead of giving birth to young that they feed through a placenta, just like mammals. They are known from fossils over 500 million years old and until recently, there was a heated debate about which animals were their closest relatives. But recent genetic analyses tell us who was right all along. Velvet worms, or onychophorans, have interested evolutionary researchers since the 19th-century¹. Recent work by Laumer et al. (2019) ², while still far from conclusive, shows a tendency […]