It would take a 55 gallon drum of raid to kill a bug that big.
Posted on 04/22/2005 12:50:39 PM PDT by demlosers
Spectacular specimen: This bug's a big one - 8 feet long - and New Mexico scientists nabbed some of its fossils
Think mosquitoes and millipedes are nasty?
Then don't look too deeply into New Mexico's past.
Today, you can squish the tiny bugs, but 300 million years ago, 8-foot-long millipedes were in control of the landscape, and humans weren't even a gleam in evolution's eye.
New Mexico is now a world record holder of such "exquisitely grotesque creatures," as one worker at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science calls them. Evidence of the largest arthropleura - its technical name - ever found was recovered by the museum on Friday.
"In today's world, you couldn't have a bug this big," said Spencer Lucas, paleontology curator at the museum. "This is basically the Tyrannosaurus of the Pennsylvanian period, millions of years before dinosaurs evolved. If you took a time machine back, you'd definitely want to check your sleeping bag for these suckers before getting in."
The Pennsylvanian time period lasted from 325 to 280 million years ago.
The museum has not found the bug itself. What it did find in a remote canyon near Española were the fossilized tracks of such a creature - which looks like a 3-by-8 speed bump with flat wings holding hundreds of nasty, ribbed, horseshoe-shaped feet.
"This is a very spectacular thing," said Adrian Hunt, director of the museum, who went out in the field with the team to recover it. "Think of it as a much bigger cross between a millipede and a centipede. It probably lived in swampy forest debris. Something like this has never been found before in the Western United States."
Evidence of the creatures has also been found in Nova Scotia and Scotland, but Jorg Schneider, an international expert on them and a paleontologist from the Freiberg Mining Academy in Germany, said New Mexico's find is evidence of the biggest arthropleura ever.
The second-largest creature was probably a few inches smaller than the one found in New Mexico. The New Mexico track is 39.3 centimeters wide, compared with the second-largest track, in Scotland, which is 36 centimeters wide, Schneider said.
Schnieder came to New Mexico for a two-week visit to look at the track and other New Mexico rocks from the same time period, he said.
"One question we have is, could such a large beast live on plant material only?" Schneider said. "In millipedes from the modern era, we know that scolopender (a type of millipede) is a predator. Possibly these big extinct versions also ate other animals. This was the top of the food chain - with no natural enemy - for about 40 to 50 million years during the Pennsylvanian."
The creatures might have been vegetarians, but their large size suggests they might have eaten early reptiles that later evolved into dinosaurs and mammals, Schneider said.
One favorite snack could have been the pelycosaur, a relative of the dimetrodon, a small, sail-backed lizard common in that age, Lucas said.
"We're still really not sure what they ate," Lucas said. "This guy was probably out patrolling the forest floor eating smaller bugs - which were still pretty big by today's standards - and maybe eating small vertebrates. New Mexico was near the equator then, and the land was much warmer and wetter."
Arthropleura died out at the end of the Pennsylvanian, probably because the amount of oxygen in the air was reduced from 30 percent during that time period to closer to the 21 percent we have today, Lucas said.
"They just couldn't survive at that size in modern air," Lucas said. "Their lungs weren't as evolved as ours. For an insect to get that big, you'd need to have a lot more oxygen in the air. These guys were an evolutionary dead end."
Millipedes and centipedes aren't directly related to arthropleura, he added, but might be from a related branch of the now-extinct creature's family tree, Lucas added.
"Breathing, food, locomotion are all problematic for a bug that big," Lucas said. "When the world changed, they just couldn't adapt."
You don't use Die-Bug-Die. You call in airstrikes and carpet patterns with napalm.
Another alternative would be to send U.N. peacekeepers, looking all cute and girly in their powder-blue helmets,
out with flamethrowers. We'll know they find these monsters when we hear the blue-helmeted ones' eeeks and shrieks.
And wouldn't it be another embarrassment if French peacekeepers surrendered to one of these things?
needs to be said.......it's Bush's fault.
:-)
Thank the good Lord it is extinct.
If they had found a LIVE one, the envirowhackos would be screaming to "reintroduce" it, and claiming protection for it as an "endangered" species.
I would never date one, nor allow my sister too, either, even if a moose did bite her once.
What a good brother you are!
We have a 5 foot insect today. It is called Barborus Boxerosus.
I won't be impressed until they find fossil evidence of a kilopede.
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"Quibbles! It's a hugh, disgusting bug, however you date it!"
Which Hugh is it?
ROFL!
It would take a 55 gallon drum of raid to kill a bug that big.
DATE IT?! What kind of movie do you take one of those to?
Hmmmm.... would this have anything to do with YOU?
I take it my usual bug spray wouldn't work on that.
Different kinds of animals make very distinctive tracks from each other. Apparently these tracks closely match the feet of an already known arthropod family, but these particular tracks are just really freakin' big compared to the more common specimens.
"Men in Black".
This brings up an interesting issue. Arthropods don't have lungs (at least, not in the mammalian sense). They breath through their skin. How could a creature this size have taken in enough oxygen to survive? It could only happen, I suspect, if the air pressure was vastly denser than it is now. We must have lost a lot of air somewhere along the path of history.
I have on occasion seen fossils of flying insects that are orders of magnitude larger than their descendants of today. This also suggests that the air was once much more dense.
More like ammonia if the taste of the modern ones is any guide...
He didn't, they're extinct!
DUH!
LOL! Bug hunt!!!
And wouldn't it be another embarrassment if French peacekeepers surrendered to one of these things?
For us, yes. For the French, non.
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