Worm

After a new Helldivers 2 update, players are discovering that developers Arrowhead have sneakily added a massive and nearly impossible-to-kill super worm, known as the Hive Lord, to the online sci-fi shooter. But one team has felled the beast, though it reportedly took nearly a dozen nukes.

On September 2, PlayStation and Arrowhead pushed out a new, free Helldivers 2 update known as “Into The Unjust.” This big update, available now on PS5, Xbox, and PC, added intricate caves to explore, new missions to complete, and a little surprise. Well, more of a big surprise. The Hive Lord, a bug the size of a skyscraper, is now an enemy you might encounter in Helldivers 2.

While the Hive Lords appeared in the first Helldivers, they hadn’t yet shown up in the sequel. Hive Lords were hinted at in the update’s trailer and have been teased in-game since launch. But Arrowhead didn’t officially list the new massive enemy in the game’s patch notes, so some players discovered the Hive Lords completely by chance and were shocked by their scale. These things are big. Huge. Easily the largest enemy in Helldivers 2. And they are very hard to kill.

At first, players weren’t even sure Hive Lords could be killed, with some reporting the beasts had survived tactical nukes and many, many bullets. But players spotted that sometimes a bullet would penetrate the beast’s armor and that it did react to explosions. “If it bleeds, it can be killed” became a rallying call under some posts of Hive Lords laying waste to players and vehicles. Even still, some weren’t sure. Maybe it was too much for the forces of democracy to handle.

Eventually, one squad of brave and dedicated Helldivers killed a Hive Lord, likely becoming one of the first teams, if not the first team, to do so. According to one of the people involved with killing the massive sand worm, it took 10+ Hellbombs, 8+ 500KG bombs, and “a ton of Ultimatums and Spears/RRs.” According to IsJustSophie, one of the Hive Lord slayers, “I shat my pants when it burst out of the ground.” Seems like a totally fair and reasonable reaction to encountering a massive god worm.

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About 500 million years ago, the Grand Canyon was a great sea, and among the creatures it harbored was a newly discovered type of penis worm, armed with many rings of teeth.

Penis worms are marine creatures with a distinctly phallic appearance. There are more than 20 known species living across the world’s oceans today, as well as a number of extinct ones, like this new discovery. The researcher who made the find was searching for fossils in the Grand Canyon and named the species Kraytdraco spectatus in honor of the huge burrowing krayt dragons that appear in the Star Wars universe. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science Advances.

The authors believe that the worm fed using a retractible throat that could be pushed outward, inside out, before being drawn in on itself—like the finger of a glove being inverted. Lining this throat were rings and rings of teeth.

Courtesy of Rhydian Evans

Trying to imagine how the ancient worm might have fed, the researchers hypothesize that along this proboscis it combined strong, sharp teeth with more delicate feathered ones for a two-stage eating process. The former could have been used to pick up food such as algae and microorganisms dispersed in the sand where the worm would have lived, the latter to filter this food out of the substrate and chew it. But having only a fossil to look at, and not being able to see the worm at work, this remains only a hypothesis.

An adult specimen would have measured about 15 to 20 centimeters long. This is much larger than the species of penis worm that survive today, which have undergone miniaturization over the millennia and now do not exceed 2 to 3 millimeters.

Although the phallic worm monopolized scientists’ attention with its teeth, fossils of other creatures were also found in the same expedition. They’re estimated to date from before the beginning of the Cambrian period, roughly 500 million years ago, considered by experts to be the dawn of complex animal life. These other creatures, early types of shrimp and mollusks, are valuable because they suggest what the world’s first predators looked like.

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Helldivers 2’s Mega Worm Has Been Killed, But It Took 10 Nukes

An Ancient Penis Worm With Rings of Sharp Teeth Has Been Discovered in the Grand Canyon