Field photographs of flatworms taken in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, by Wong Fook Yee. Every record is dated, located, and photographed in the wild.
Rhabditophora is a class within the phylum Platyhelminthes, the flatworms. It contains the free-living flatworms — including the land planarians seen on wet ground and foliage after rain — as well as the parasitic flukes and tapeworms.
"Worm" is a body shape, not a group. Animals called worms belong to several unrelated branches of the animal kingdom, and this site keeps them apart rather than together:
A flatworm is about as closely related to an earthworm as a human is to a starfish. Filing them together under a single heading would lose that, so they are filed by class, as everything else in Fauna of Borneo is.
No name is given beyond the rank the evidence actually supports. Land planarians are separated on internal anatomy rather than external appearance, so a photographic record is often determinable no further than subfamily. Each page states plainly what is known, what is not, and what would settle the question. A wrong name is worse than no name.
31 August 2011, 09:06. Kundasang, Ranau district, about 1,500 m, on a hilltop overlooking Mount
Kinabalu. An orange-yellow flatworm about 10 cm long with a fine pale dorsal line and a dark
brown crescent-shaped head plate, moving very slowly on a leaf on a cold windy morning. Two
photographs, including a close view of the head.
Recorded as subfamily Bipaliinae — the hammerhead worms. Genus not determined.
All photographs © Wong Fook Yee. Page reviewed: 2 September 2026.