双头蠕虫带来生物进化新认知(中)

And he realized that he and his team weren’t the first to be fascinated.

他意识到，他和他的团队并不是第一个对此着迷的。

Ponz found that there was a golden age of research on “monster creatures” during the 18th and 19th centuries.

庞兹发现，在18世纪和19世纪，曾有过一段研究“怪物生物”的黄金时期。

100 plus year old literature would refer to the sentiments of monsters, creatures, or monsters, or oddities or, you know, they're, they're all these these variations that describe them.

一百多年前的文学作品会提到怪物的说法，creatures，monsters，或oddities，这些词都是描述怪物的变体。

And in the end, these these animals are not not monsters.

归根结底，这些动物并不是怪物。

A fixation with the “reanimated Monster” makes sense, especially back then.

对“复活怪物”的痴迷是有道理的，尤其是在那个时代。

Author Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, was published in 1818, and it only further intensified interest–and some of that interest translated into actual research.

作家玛丽·雪莱的小说《弗兰肯斯坦》于1818年出版，这本书进一步增强了人们的兴趣——其中一些兴趣转化成了实际的研究。

Ponz and a team of international researchers conducted a wide-sweeping review of the existing knowledge about monster worms.

庞兹和一组国际研究人员对现有的关于怪物虫子的知识进行了广泛的回顾。

They dove into 275 years' worth of research — combing through scientists' observational journals, reading historical texts, and even reaching out to the broader scientific community to see if anyone knew anything about records of abnormal worms.

他们对275年的研究材料进行了深入的研究——梳理了科学家的观察日志，阅读了历史文献，甚至联系了更广泛的科学界，看看是否有人了解关于畸形蠕虫的记录。

They wanted to understand all of the different types and patterns of bifurcation and see if there were any clues about how the oddities developed.

他们想要了解所有不同类型和图案的分叉虫子，看看是否有任何关于这些奇怪形状是如何发育的线索。

Their search landed them in a jackpot of both history and science.

他们的探索使他们获得了历史和科学的双重大奖。

They came across documents and drawings of bifurcated worms from around the world — in Latin, French and German, all the way to Russian, Japanese, and even Indonesian.

他们找到了来自世界各地的关于分岔蠕虫的文件和图纸——涉及拉丁语、法语和德语，以及俄语、日语，甚至印度尼西亚语的材料。

All in all, they spent over a year working through the archives, translating old texts, and following the trail of monster worm clues.

总而言之，他们花了一年多的时间整理档案，翻译旧文本，追踪怪物蠕虫的线索。

What they learned is that bifurcation in worms has been observed in over 60 species of worms across the annelid family tree, and in some species, up to 20% of the juveniles ended up with some form of bifurcation.

他们所了解到的是，在环节动物族谱中，已经观察到超过60种蠕虫的分叉现象，在一些物种中，高达20%的幼虫最终出现了某种形式的分叉现象。

This work was recently published in the journal Biological Reviews.

这项研究最近发表在《生物评论》杂志上。