Posted on 10/10/2024 4:30:12 AM PDT by Red Badger
WASHINGTON (AP) — As if the largest bug to ever live – a monster nearly 9 feet long with several dozen legs – wasn’t terrifying enough, scientists could only just imagine what the extinct beast’s head looked like.
That’s because many of the fossils of these creatures are headless shells that were left behind when they molted, squirming out of their exoskeletons through the head opening as they grew ever bigger — up to 8 to 9 feet (2.6 meters) and more than 100 pounds (50 kilograms).
Now, scientists have produced a mug shot after studying fossils of juveniles that were complete and very well preserved, if not quite cute.
The giant bug’s topper was a round bulb with two short bell-shaped antennae, two protruding eyes like a crab, and a rather small mouth adapted for grinding leaves and bark, according to new research published Wednesday in Science Advances.
Called Arthropleura, these were arthropods -- the group that includes crabs, spiders and insects – with features of modern-day centipedes and millipedes. But some of them were much, much bigger, and this one was a surprising mix.
“We discovered that it had the body of a millipede, but head of a centipede,” said study co-author and paleobiologist Mickael Lheritier at the University Claude Bernard Lyon in Villeurbanne, France.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
There were dragonflies that had 4 feet wingspans..................I wonder what else was crawling around in the Precambrian swamps?.............
Or they couldn’t get a ticket on the boat.
How long before these are cloned and released in red states?
AAAAAHHHHH!!!
(thanks for all the future nightmares...)
well, might be good boiled and dipped in melted butte.
I bet you could ride it!
Yup.
A Chicxulub-sized event rings the planet like a bell, any fault that is near its critical strain is apt to let loose.
Doctors and coroners have a term, coup contrecoup, that means damage to the opposite side of the brain from where the skull was struck.
Imagine you are standing on the spot exactly on the opposite side from the strike. The shock waves race around the globe and come together (focus, if you will) right under your feet!
On a lower gravity bodies such as the moon, big impacts have delivered sufficient coup contrecoup force to jet material off into space.
I don’t doubt that nearby magma would be squirted up through the resulting shattered bedrock.
Add to that the fact that Chicxulub was a shallow water strike and the surrounding sea formed a wall around the white hot crater as it attempted to flood in. It was like a 120 mile wide rocket nozzle jetting vaporized seawater and any entrained atmosphere into space. Global atmospheric pressure and sea level drop permanently. As the crater was quenched, the force of the boiling reduced, and the remaining flood of sea water and air steam-cleaned half the planet.
It was a bad day.
On land nothing larger than a house cat survived. I suspect all the surviving animals were burrow dwellers or nesters, animals already used to breathing lower oxygen content than their larger peers. The thinned atmosphere was a final insult to the bigger surface dwellers.
They all died off as a result of Globul Schwarming.
We need to get those bugs back. They are bioweapons against lefty liberals!
also the air pressure was much higher.
Study hyperbaric therapy. You will know one reason why we used to live longer, and animals and plants used to be bigger.
Yes, the earth was much smaller back then
It would take a really big shoe to squash that thing.
Wuhan lab looking for a new project.
No doubt someone will try to get a grant from the WEF to try and find some remote genetic descendant and try to resurrect these as menu items. (I have shellfish allergies so its not something that would ever appear on in my grocery list! )
If you used these as bait what sort of a rig would you need to fish? What would you be fishing for and where? So many questions!
Yes, the earth was much smaller back then
—
Or it was a moon of Saturn - where all the land mass was concentrated in one location facing away from the planet, where gravity would have been much less. Also, a time when the Moon had not yet arrived.
I guess that could feed a family of four for quite a while. I wonder if Bill Gates is aware.
Cavemen with shotguns!
with a brain mass approaching that of a democrat presidential candidate...
Should feed lots of wokesters.....barbeque...yeah!
Note how the scientist said that by using the estimations of the juveniles head he could figure out what the adult head looked like ..”close enough”...how would the scientist know it was close enough?
Tastes kinda like spotted owl.
Will they be bringing them back as the bugs we are supposed to eat? With the caveat being that we must catch them ourselves?
I pray they never find its DNA.
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