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Parasites scare me.

I think of corticeps, the parasitic fungus that inspired the video game turned TV series, The Last of Us, the one that in real life bursts out of the head of ants and controls them when they're dead.

Or I think of people finding a tapeworm in their bodies after eating raw meat.

Those have haunted me since childhood.

And even more unsettling, I was reminded recently by a paleontologist that parasites have been around a lot longer than I had thought.

We have fossils as old as about 515, 516 million years old that have evidence of parasites on them.

And these are kind of small, worm-like animals, building tubes on top of these shelled creatures

called brachio pods in order to basically steal the food that they're drawing into their mouths.

Carmen Nanglu's that paleontologist.

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