Rohan Barnard, a student from Stellenbosch University, went to explore the Swartberg Mountains. These mountains lie between the towns of Calitzdorp and Oudtshoorn. Barnard wasn’t looking for anything extraordinary—he was simply turning over rocks to look for ants and reptiles.

But under the damp sand and leaves near a small river, he found something unexpected: a small, slate-black velvet worm. These animals are very rare, so Barnard took a picture and shared it on the iNaturalist app, which people use to record and identify plants and animals.

Scientists later studied the worm and found that it was a brand-new species. They named it Peripatopsis barnardi in honour of the student who discovered it.

Ancient creatures from a long-lost time

Velvet worms belong to a group of animals called Onychophora. Scientists often call them “living fossils” because their kind has been around for more than 500 million years. That’s even older than the dinosaurs! These creatures have soft bodies and short, non-jointed legs. They’ve stayed the same for a very long time, which makes them very special.

Finding P. barnardi in the Karoo is exciting because it shows that this area was not always dry. A long time ago, it had a cooler and wetter climate, with forests and rivers. This gave ancient animals like velvet worms the right kind of home.

“The discovery tells about the ancient climate history of the region,” explained Prof. Savel Daniels, an evolutionary biologist at Stellenbosch University. He said that the Cape Fold Mountains, where the worm was found, were once part of a warm, forested region during the early Miocene period. Over millions of years, the land changed. It became drier due to shifts in the Earth’s climate and moving land plates. As the area changed, creatures like the velvet worm got stuck in small, damp places. That’s how they survived and slowly became different from their relatives.

Prof. Daniels also spoke about how important regular people can be in helping science. When people take photos of animals and plants and share them online, they can help scientists learn new things.

“Many of South Africa's velvet worm species have been found through citizen science initiatives,” he said.

Velvet worms are fascinating because they look like they’re from another world. They are related to strange creatures like the Hallucigenia, which lived in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago. Even today, velvet worms are very picky about where they live. They only survive in cool and damp places, similar to what was found on the ancient supercontinent Gondwana.

With inputs from “Perched on the Plateau: Speciation in a Cape Fold Mountain Velvet Worm Clade, With the Description of Seven New Species (Onychophora: Peripatopsidae: Peripatopsis) From South Africa” by Savel R. Daniels and Aaron Barnes, 20 April 2025, Ecology and Evolution.

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