The mystery scientist so hauntingly quoted on the ubiquity of roundworms in Ralph Buschbaum's 1938 textbook Animals Without Backbones (Nature 474, 6; 2011) is biologist Nathan Cobb (1858–1932).

Cobb's pioneering work laid the foundations for the systematic discovery and study of nematodes. Members of the Nematoda are best known for supplying us with the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, but it is their abundance and diversity that makes them central to biology.

Cobb would have undoubtedly been thrilled, but perhaps not surprised, by the discovery of his beloved worms more than 3 kilometres inside Earth's crust.