Researchers have unearthed fossils of a spiky, armored worm from the Xiaoshiba deposit of South China. Researchers from Yunnan University, China, and the University of Cambridge, England, have studied the 500 million- year-old worm.

As per the researchers, it is one of the first creatures to have developed armored protection. The creature has been named Collinsium ciliosum, or Hairy Collins' Monster, named for the palaeontologist Desmond Collins, who first discovered a similar Canadian fossil in the 1980s.

The newly discovered species used to live in what is now China during the Cambrian explosion. Upon assessment, the researchers said that the worm is a distant early ancestor of modern velvet worms.

One of the lead researchers of the study, Dr Javier Ortega-Hernandez of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, said, "Modern velvet worms are all pretty similar in terms of their general body organisation and not that exciting in terms of their lifestyle".

The worm had a soft and squishy body, six pairs of feather-like front legs and nine pairs of rear legs ending in claws. The Chinese Collins' Monster had a great defensive mechanism in which it had 72 sharp and pointy spikes of different sizes covering its body.

Ortega-Hernandez said that fossils of these creatures are hard to find and are generally fragmented. Therefore, its discovery has greatly improved understanding of such rare organisms.