Nicholas Higgs, the project's lead scientist, searched through bones from the 19th century before bringing a promising specimen back to London and putting it under a micro-CT scanner.
He said: "Fossils of worms are really rare. We don't know a lot about their fossil record because they're soft animals," he said.
"But, because these particular worms leave characteristic borings, we can trace them."
Unusually, Osedax worms do not have a mouth or intestine but they infiltrate bones with fleshy root tissues to extract food.
They are also known by the colourful name of "bone-eating snot flowers".
The findings are published in the journal Historical Biology.
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