What are Velvet Worms?
Velvet worms are bizzare creatures living in leaf litter on the floors of tropical forests. They superficially resemble caterpillars and are called “worms with legs,” but they’re their own phylum, Onychophora, which means “claw-bearers.” This is a reference to the small chitin claws on their stub feet. Growing to between 0.5 and 50 cm (0.2 – 12.5 in), with an average length of 5 cm (2 in) velvet worms are segmented animals with between 13 and 43 pairs of legs. Velvet worms come in a variety of colors, including brown, white, blue, grey, pink, and red. They share similarities with both arthropods (like spiders) and annelids (like earthworms), but are considered more closely related to arthropods, even though it was thought for many decades they were more related to annelids. More distantly, they are related to nematodes and horsehair worms. Velvet worms are believed to have existed in their current form for an extremely long time, maybe as long as 430 million years, when the first anima
Velvet worms are bizzare creatures living in leaf litter on the floors of tropical forests. They superficially resemble caterpillars and are called “worms with legs,” but they’re their own phylum, Onychophora, which means “claw-bearers.” This is a reference to the small chitin claws on their stub feet. Growing to between 0.5 and 50 cm (0.2 – 12.5 in), with an average length of 5 cm (2 in) velvet worms are segmented animals with between 13 and 43 pairs of legs. Velvet worms come in a variety of colors, including brown, white, blue, grey, pink, and red. They share similarities with both arthropods (like spiders) and annelids (like earthworms), but are considered more closely related to arthropods, even though it was thought for many decades they were more related to annelids. More distantly, they are related to nematodes and horsehair worms.
