From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about animals known as worms. There are also computer worms, and the dragons known as wyrms, sometimes spelt this way. Ringworm, so-called, is a fungous disease of the skin.
A worm is any of numerous relatively small elongated soft-bodied invertebrate animals. The most famous is the earthworm, a member of phylum Annelida, but there are hundreds of thousands of different species that live in a wide variety of habitats other than soil.
Originally, the word referred to any creeping or a crawling animal of any kind or size, such as a serpent, caterpillar, snail, or the like. Later this definition was narrowed to the modern definition which still includes several different animal groups. Major phyla include:
- Annelida (segmented worms)
- Sipuncula (peanut worms)
- Onychophora (velvet worms)
- Acanthocephala (spiny-headed worms)
- Nematoda (roundworms)
- Nematomorpha (horsehair worms)
- Nemertea (ribbonworms)
- Platyhelminthes (flatworms)
- Gnathostomulida (jaw worms)
- Chaetognatha (arrow worms)
