GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK – A new fossil that looks like a Star Wars creature has been discovered in the walls of the Grand Canyon.
The microscopic Cambrian-era worm had a retractable mouth and hundreds of spiky teeth. It was named Kraytdraco spectatus because of its resemblance to the “krayt dragon” from Star Wars, which also has lots of teeth but is much, MUCH bigger.
“When I started finding this wormy-looking animal that came from a canyon, that was full of teeth and looked brownish under the microscope, there were too many points in common with the fictional beast,” lead author Giovanni Mussini told the Arizona Republic. “We thought, this is a great excuse to give this animal a pop culture-inspired name.”
Thousands of new and “exceptionally preserved” fossils were discovered by Mussini and a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge. They published their findings in July (2025).
They collected rock samples from the Grand Canyon in 2023. They used high-powered microscopes to make their breakthrough discoveries. One fist-sized rock contained more than a thousand microscopic fossils. In the Cambrian era, portions of the Grand Canyon were in the “Goldilocks Zone,” a prehistoric shoreline with the right conditions for evolution to take off, triggering an explosion of new species.
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