Ten Million Aliens by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books/Marble Arch Press

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I. The common poorwill, a nightjar relative that lives in the United States, does actually hibernate. A number of species – some swifts, nightjars and hummingbirds – go in for torpor, a short-term drop-out when conditions are against them. These include the swifts that come to Britain for the summer.

The Quaker worm

The Gospel according to Matthew begins with a genealogy: “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judah and his brethren; and Judah begat Pharez and Zerah of Tamar; and Pharez begat Hezron and Hezron begat Ran…” We are all tied to the past by the genes we carry in every cell of our bodies – and we humans have as our ancestor the same creature that begat xenoturbellids.

Xenoturbellid means strange flatworm: same prefix as xenophobia, which means fear of strangers. Here’s a small and apparently pointless little phylum of apparently pointless little creatures. Oh – and by the way, they’re related to you. Not just in the sense that everything in the Animal Kingdom has some kind of relationship to everything else in the Animal Kingdom. These weird little lumps of nothing very much are really quite close to us on the evolutionary bush. The branches keep on forking: but the common ancestor shared by humans – by all vertebrates – and the xenoturbellids was on the same stem for far longer than you’d believe possible to look at them. The fork where we parted company is not as far behind us as we’d think.

If you ever ask a Quaker what Quakers do and what Quakers believe, you will generally get told all the things they don’t do and don’t believe in. Xenoturbellids are in much the same position. They have no brain, no through gut, no excretory system and no sex organs in any coherent form. They really are not anything much, but they are part of our comparatively recent history just the same. What have they got, then? They are wormy things about 4 cm, 1.6 inches, long and they have flagellate cells – cells with little whips on, a reasonably familiar concept by now. They can be found in waters off Scotland, Iceland and Sweden. They were discovered in 1915 by Sixten Bock, a name I shall surely use for the villain if I ever write a thriller. They were not fully described until 1949, when Eimar Westfald did the job. There are two species described so far in the entire phylum: they are called Xenoturbella bocki and X. westfaldi, as is only right and proper.

Their relatively close relationship with ourselves was put forward by Max Telford of Cambridge University, who said: “We have been able to show that amongst all the invertebrates that exist, Xenoturbellida is one of our closest relatives. It’s fascinating to think that whatever long-dead animals this simple worm evolved from, so did we.” Relatedness happens. It’s the way life works.

Think what that means for a moment. The ancestor shared by xenoturbellids and humans was presumably no more complicated than the Quaker worm itself.

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