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First ‘true’ millipede with over 1,000 legs discovered deep below Earth’s surface

Emerging from a drill hole in Western Australia, a new record holder for leggiest animal on the planet.

Around the world, more than 7,000 species of millipede crawl across forest floors and garden beds, pairs of legs pumping as they move through soil in search of food. The limbs can number in the dozens to the hundreds, and while the term “millipede” translates to “a thousand feet,” the record number of millipede movers has stood at around 750 legs since the description of a Californian species back in 2006.

“Millipede” has been a misnomer. A thousand feet? A myth. Until today.

“All of the introductory textbooks will have to be rewritten because there is a true millipede now,” says Dennis Black, a millipede expert and adjunct research fellow at LaTrobe University in Australia.

The “true” millipede has been dubbed Eumillipes persephone. The new species was discovered in a borehole, drilled as part of a Western Australian mining operation, almost 200 feet (60 meters) below the Earth’s surface. It’s the first millipede to live up to its multi-legged moniker with a staggering 1,306 legs.

“That’s just an amazing number,” says Paul Marek, an entomologist at Virginia Tech and lead author of a paper documenting the find, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. “I’m still in disbelief.”

Named for Persephone, the Greek goddess of the underworld, the spindly, brown crawler is just over 3.7 inches long and about as thin as a USB cable. The millipede also lives much deeper in the soil than any previously known species, and the story of its discovery makes for a tale of great luck and incredible irony.

Portal to the underworld

The first person to set eyes on the Persephone millipede was Bruno Buzatto, principal biologist at Bennelongia Environmental Consultants in Western Australia. The group specializes in subterranean surveys of animal life and is often contracted by mining companies looking to perform environmental assessments as they search for resources. The mining companies drill the holes that, Buzatto says, are like “portals” into the subterranean world.

To assess what life lurks in the underworld beneath our feet, Buzatto sends “traps” through the portals. He takes a plastic tube with a few holes in the side and fills it with leaf litter. He then drops it down one of the drill holes and leaves it there. Life in the soil is attracted to the litter, hoping to fill its stomach. When Buzatto pulls the trap out a month or two later, it’s often teeming with life.

Buzatto says these traps routinely catch new creatures, some of which have never been seen before. “About 80 to 90% of what we pull up is undescribed species,” he says. So it was no surprise to him when, in August 2020, he laid eyes on an unusual animal he’d never seen before. In a haul plucked from a hole in the Eastern Goldfields Province of Western Australia, Buzatto found an extremely long millipede. “I realized it was a very special animal,” he says.

A few years earlier, Buzatto had been flicking through a research paper about Illacme plenipes, a Californian species of millipede with the record for most number of legs. The lead author of that study was Paul Marek, an entomologist at Virginia Tech. Buzatto shot him an email, attaching a picture of his find.

“I did a quick count and it had 818 legs,” Marek says. “I was pretty pumped about that.”

To make it official, Marek needed to see the specimens, place them under a powerful microscope and analyze their DNA. Buzatto, in collaboration with the Western Australian Museum, shipped specimens to Marek’s lab in the US. In total, the team was able to find and analyze five millipedes, with one female taking out the legs record (1,306) and a male falling just short of the mythic 1,000-leg mark at 998.

Why so many legs?

The Persephone millipede lives in a world with no light and, likely, limited food. Evolution has built it for this world with unique characteristics – similar to, but distinct from, Illacma plenipes.

When Marek was able to look at the Persephone under the microscope, he noticed many similarities to the Illacme plenipes, a millipede that lives halfway across the world, separated by the Pacific Ocean. However, it also had some bizarre features. “It was nothing like other members of the family,” Marek says.

For one, it had no eyes, which is unique in this order of animals. Two, it was unpigmented.

Both changes make sense. Living in the underworld, eyes aren’t all that important. You don’t need to detect changes in the light. Instead, the Persephone has huge antennae. Pigmentation loss occurs in a wide variety of animals that live in places without light, such as caves, but the evolutionary pressures underlying pigmentation loss are still being fully elucidated.

All of the characteristics helped Marek and the team place the species in the order Polyzoniida, distant relatives of the previous leggiest record holder, and suggested the Persephone and Illacma plenipes are an example of convergent evolution – where two distantly related species evolve similar physiological traits to adapt to their niches.

But why does a creature need so many legs?

The answer isn’t all that surprising. Legs are for locomotion. They allow you to move around the world. The researchers haven’t seen live specimens moving around in their home underworld, but they can draw on insights from similar species in nature. Based on earlier studies, Marek and the team suggest the super-elongation and short legs help to burrow through the underworld, providing additional propulsive force as it moves in a telescoping motion.

“The combination of these characteristics really speaks to the importance of being able to traverse deep underground, probably as a result of a limited set of nutrients in the place that it lives,” Marek said.

Minefield

There is a great irony to the discovery, one that several of the authors have wrestled with.

Collecting and describing new species from deep within the soil hasn’t been done to a great extent in Western Australia. There could be dozens of species living underneath our feet that we have never seen before. Before August 2020, no one had ever seen the Persephone millipede. No one knew it existed. And it would have remained that way, if not for Buzatto’s drill hole trap.

“I don’t think we would have ever known about this had it not been for the mineral exploration that’s occurring,” says Dennis Black, the millipede expert from LaTrobe and a co-author on the study. Buzatto notes the mining company, in this instance, paid for the surveys.

At the same time, the main threat to the survival of the species, at least as far as we know right now, would be those same mining operations. If a rich resource was discovered in the same mining exploration what would win out? The millipede? Fortunately for the Persephone, Buzatto notes the area it was discovered in isn’t one in which the mining company is looking to target.

But it raises interesting questions about how to protect species like the Persephone we don’t even know about, so-called “cryptic” organisms contributing to ecosystems we know nothing about. These ecosystems, Persephone shows, are yielding incredible discoveries and preventing further loss of biodiversity. To prevent an anonymous extinction, scientists need to know what’s out there, including deep beneath the surface of the Western Australian desert.

“There couldn be a heck of a lot living over that vast area,” Black says. “We simply don’t have a clue.”

If we did, there’s a chance the Persephone too will be dethroned. Marek says there’s “some correlation” between the depth at which these creatures are found and the number of legs they have. Exploring even deeper below the surface might mean running into another god of the underworld, leggier than we’d ever imagined.

“It’s possible there are longer ones down there,” Black says. “What I want to do is win the lotto, buy some drilling equipment and spend my retirement drilling holes.”

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Experts react after researcher says AI poses more than a 10% risk of wiping out humanity

AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic while warning that the company and OpenAI are advancing powerful systems too quickly. His concerns were echoed by Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger, who estimated a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

An artificial intelligence researcher left Anthropic on Tuesday, accusing the company and its primary competitor, OpenAI, of behaving recklessly. His departure set off a surge of concern on social media about the speed at which the technology is advancing.

Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both organizations, said in a post on X that he resigned because Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said the people developing AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

Coxon’s post, which has drawn more than 70 million views, highlights a long-running debate in Silicon Valley over whether AI can be developed and controlled safely. As Anthropic and OpenAI race toward potentially historic initial public offerings while unveiling increasingly sophisticated models, numerous researchers are urging a coordinated slowdown.

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a blog post Sunday that no AI company has “solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” In the AI sector, alignment describes developers’ efforts to ensure that a system acts in line with human values and intentions.

“I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established,” Pachocki wrote. “And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.”

Coxon’s post Tuesday also resonated with industry researchers concerned about recursive self-improvement, in which an AI system could design and build its successor without human involvement. Although recursive self-improvement is not currently possible, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies have warned that it could make it easier for people to lose control of such systems.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence.”

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, supported Coxon’s remarks in a post on X late Tuesday.

“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Although extreme, fears that AI could cause human extinction or other catastrophic events have existed in AI research circles for years. In 2023, prominent researchers and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Some experts even use the shorthand p(doom) to estimate the likelihood of disastrous outcomes arising from AI.

Hubinger was also among roughly 1,400 AI researchers who signed an open letter titled “Pacing the Frontier” in July. The letter called on the U.S. government to create the tools needed to support an effort to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

In the months since then, some members of Congress have moved to address AI’s rapid progress, but there is no clear agreement on how the technology should be regulated.

In July, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., introduced the FRONTIER Act, legislation designed to create a framework for overseeing the deployment of advanced AI models. Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would temporarily halt advanced AI development until the federal government puts safety rules in place. Both proposals have received mixed reactions.

“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” Trahan wrote in a post on X Wednesday. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”

Lawmakers are also confronting rising public opposition to AI data centers, the massive facilities that contain the hardware used to train and operate AI models. The backlash has intensified to the point that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, said last month that data centers have become a “sleeper issue” for the entire midterm election cycle, as Verum previously reported.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that AI companies have done a “horrendous job of explaining themselves to the American people.”

“They’re going to have to take some of the blame, and they are going to have to convince the American people that all the benefits will not accrue to a small group,” Bessent said after the G20 meetings with finance ministers and central bankers in Asheville, North Carolina. “That’s what they hear from me.”

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Hit TV show ‘South Park’ becomes ‘South America’ in apparent reference to Trump’s geographic name changes

Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said in a statement that they were “inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google.”

Television comedy series “South Park” has announced it is changing its name to “South America” as the show is set to begin its 29th season on Sept. 16.

The show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said, “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”

Parker and Stone’s statement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America amid a trade spat with Canada. Canadian officials said they will not recognize the new name.

Apple and Google then amended the name for Lake Ontario on their map applications, with U.S. users seeing “Lake America,” while Canadian users saw “Lake Ontario.”

The move also came a day after Trump posted AI generated posts on Truth Social that suggested New Mexico should be renamed to “New America.”

Last year, the president used an executive order to change the name for the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, drawing international opposition.

“South Park” won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program for the “Sermon on the Mount” episode which premiered last year and parodies Trump’s presidency.

The “Skydance Capitulation” line comes after the $8 billion merger between parent company Paramount and Skydance, which was approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year after Paramount settled a lawsuit brought by Trump for $16 million.

Trump had alleged an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2024 with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, was deceptively edited.

Paramount subsidiary CBS News in July 2025 said it was canceling comedian Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” citing financial reasons, just days after Colbert accused Paramount of paying Trump a “big fat bribe.” The final episode of the show aired in May.

Paramount and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Trump says he has no regrets about starting the Iran war as U.S. dials up economic pressure

Speaking to Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham, Trump said that he would have attacked Iran despite the impact on the midterm elections.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he has no regrets about starting the Iran war and added that “If I had it to do again, I would do exactly what I did.”

Speaking to Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham on Thursday stateside, Trump said that he would have attacked Iran despite the impact on the midterm elections.

“If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now,” Ingraham told Trump, to which Trump replied “supposing we were cruising, and all of a sudden Iran has a nuclear weapon. They would use it.”

He added that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, the Islamic Republic would “wipe out” Israel and the Middle East, and start hitting U.S. cities.

His comments come as markets brace for a longer Iran war, after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that top White House advisors had discussed with Trump the possibility that the Iran war could drag on beyond his current term.

Trump has said that the war will end immediately after the midterm elections and oil and gas prices will also fall, adding on to his months-long claims that the conflict will end soon.

In separate comments to NewsNation on Thursday, Trump denied reports that there was any damage to U.S. assets, after Iran claimed it had hit multiple U.S. fighter aircraft at a base in Jordan.

“No damage. No nothing,” Trump said, when asked if there was any truth to the reports.

Economic pressure

Washington is continuing efforts to isolate Iran from its economic network, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flagging sanctions against “a large bank” next week.

“We’re going to do it on Monday because we want to honor the memory of our fallen citizens on 9/11. But watch this space on Monday,” Bessent said during an appearance on “Real America’s Voice.”

Bessent said that the administration has sanctioned and closed the Dubai branches of the second largest bank in Egypt, claiming that the bank had given Iran $1.8 billion dollars. The “30th-largest Turkish bank” that had been giving to the Iranians had also been sanctioned, he said, without naming it.

The U.S. had sanctioned Turkey-based Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi Anonim Sirketi (Golden Global Bank) and its subsidiaries last week.

Trump, in the NewsNation interview, was also asked how Iran could continue holding out under the current economic pressure.

“I don’t know that they’re gonna be able to hold out,” Trump said. “But it’ll get settled after the elections. Or maybe sooner. But it’ll get settled right after the election.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Bessent said the 30th largest Turkish bank had been sanctioned. An earlier version misstated the bank’s ranking.

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