A news item from Microsoft this morning - their seeming to have taken a leaf from the 'Guardian' web site by including snippets of interesting science in their news feed.
In this case the news that while human beings might have come from Africa a few tens of thousands of years ago, worms came from Scotland half a billion years ago. '... A fossilized millipede-like creature discovered in Scotland may represent the oldest-known land animal, a humble pioneer of terrestrial living 425 million years ago that helped pave the way for the throngs that would eventually inhabit Earth's dry parts. Researchers said the fossil of the Silurian Period creature, called Kampecaris obanensis and unearthed on the island of Kerrera in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, inhabited a lakeside environment and likely ate decomposing plants. Fossils of the oldest-known plant with a stem, called Cooksonia, were found in the same ancient lake region as Kampecaris...'.
I presume that Obanensis is cod-Latin for a native of Oban, a seaside resort in the west of Scotland we once intended to visit, more than forty years ago now. Never made it - although we did pass through Crianlarich a little to the east much more recently.
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