Meet Mephisto, the worm that rules the underworld

The Beatrix gold mine lies a few hours outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, in one of the richest gold fields in the world. It extends more than two kilometres underground and every year, 10,000 workers extract around 11 tonnes of gold from the mine. But recently, something living came up with the gold, a creature that has been named after Mephisto, the Devil from the Faust legend. So far, this seems like something from a stock fantasy tale, where miners dig “too greedily and too deep”, and release an ancient unspeakable evil. Fortunately, the creature that lurks in the Beatrix mine – Halicephalobus mephisto –is just a worm, barely half a millimetre long. It’s no demon of shadow and flame, but it is an incredibly surprising find. It’s an animal that lives where no other animals were thought to exist, in the rocky underworld known as the “deep subsurface”. The ...