Urban Highways, Biodiversity, and the Velvet Worm

Today's show is about the widening of the Caversham Valley Highway and what affect it will have on the velvet worm, the peripatus, in whose habitat the road will now extend.  The peripatus is a very important scientific discovery: there is a great deal of international interest in the entomological community over the possibility that this creature represents a whole new phylum, and it has been suggested to be the missing link between worms and arthropods.  It looks like it may have been the first creature to walk, though on the whole very little is known about these very rare and secretive little things. Whatever those debates, though, it is certain that the peripatus represents a genetic structure that has remained virtually unchanged for somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 million years.  To put that in some perspective, the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and the Tuatara, the ‘living fossil’, has been around for 225 million years.