THE SHIPWORM IS AN UNASSUMING creature—not a worm, actually, but a bivalve mollusk with a soft, naked body that coils out of a smaller shell like a beckoning finger. In the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London, the diminutive specimen is preserved and placed alongside pieces of a ship it had begun to devour, its skinny white body juxtaposed against fissured brown wood.
Natural history museums have all sorts of things in their collections, but even so, it might seem an odd choice to put this mollusk on such prominent display. But the shipworm was a creature of great interest to colonial Britain. The worm gets its name from its preferred diet, and they bored deep into wooden hulls, imperiling their structural integrity and, in turn, the entire empire.
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