velvet worm

Or peripatus invertebrate with soft body (15-150 mm/0.5-5.9 in in length), velvety skin and paired unsegmented legs. They are found in leaf-litter in rainforests in Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South America, and feed on small invertebrates. They are unlike any other invertebrates and so the 200 species occupy their own phylum, Onychophora. Velvet worms date back 400 million years and may be a ‘missing link’ between the arthropods (insects and crustaceans) and annelids (soft-bodied segmented worms, including earthworms). The 20-40 million-year-old fossils of two new kinds of velvet worm were discovered by US palaeontologists in 1996.