RAUPP: Apparently, Peanut went out one morning when the hammerhead worms were moving from one part of the property to another part of the property across the driveway. SIMON: Despite such vast experience, Professor Raupp had never seen a hammerhead until his friend, Washington Post reporter Kevin Ambrose, found one in his backyard - or more accurately, around Kevin Ambrose's little dog, Peanut. And I've seen tapeworms, you know, coming out of the rear end of a cat and things like that. You know, I saw liver flukes in the slaughterhouses of New Jersey. RAUPP: Many of these are internal parasites of humans and other organisms. SIMON: Bipalium - Latin for two shovels - is a type of flatworm, a pretty disagreeable group of worms in the estimation of the professor. These are, like, tiny nightmares in your landscape. These are some of the creepiest creatures on the planet. This is a hammerhead worm, and that's its hammerhead right there. Professor Raupp describes this being as looking like a whole-wheat noodle. Even his current Zoom background is a picture of a striped, slithery invertebrate with a shovel-shaped head - in other words, not BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music. For a bug guy, he's recently had a wormy time. SIMON: He's professor emeritus in the Department of Etymology at the University of Maryland. MICHAEL RAUPP: I try to demystify the lives of invertebrates, particularly insects.
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