Explore the planet Mars with realistic Mars habitats, rockets, ground cars and robots. Map-of-mars.jpg (JPEG Image, 1280x782 pixels) - Scaled (78%) Michael Madden (Chief_Scientist) sur Twitter. Langley Research Center. ‘Worms from hell’ unearth possibilities for extraterrestrial life. The two lead researchers, Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent in Belgium and Tullis Onstott of Princeton University, said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, was akin to finding “Moby Dick in Lake Ontario.”
“This is telling us something brand new,” said Onstott, whose pioneering work in South Africa over the past decade has revolutionized the understanding of microbial life known generally as extremophiles, which live in places long believed to be uninhabitable. “For a relatively complex creature like a nematode to penetrate that deep is simply remarkable,” he said. An article introducing the subterranean nematodes, one of which was formally named Halicephalobus mephisto after the “Lord of the Underworld,” appears in Wednesday’s edition of the journal Nature.