Summary:
A fossil of a giant worm that lived in the ocean floor has been discovered in China.

Full article:
By . Sam Webb . An horrific-looking creature with hundreds of vicious, needle-like teeth has been discovered by Chinese paleontologists. The unusual-looking beast, known as Atopodentatus unicus, lived in the middle Triassic approximately 240 million years ago and is a brand new species and genus. Dr Xiao-chun Wu, a palaeontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, led the team that made the incredible discovery. Bizarre: The unusual-looking beast, known as Atopodentatus unicus, lived in the middle Triassic approximately 240 million years ago . Their find in the Guanling Formation in Southwest China was published in Naturwissenschaften. Atopodentatus unicus belongs to the sauropterygians, a group of aquatic reptiles that developed from land ancestors and flourished during the Mesozoic before they became extinct at the end of the era. The fossilized skeleton was nearly complete, with just the right side of the skull missing, and from its snout to its tail, the creature was about 3 metres (9 feet) long. Science is Awesome reports that the teeth were arranged in 35 sets in a vertical pattern in the centre of the upper jaw, resembling a cleft palate. It would have been too thin and brittle to attack and consume large prey and were most likely to have been used to filter sea worms and other small creatures from the ocean floor. The unusual shape of the jaw  probably helped scoop up food that the teeth filtered out.