[demlosers]

GEOLOGIC TIME

Pennsylvanian Period: 325 to 280 million years ago, a time of giant bugs. First reptiles appear. The land is covered with ferns and coal swamps.

Permian Period: 280 to 248 million years ago. Amphibians and reptiles dominate the landscape. Pangea supercontinent forms.

Triassic Period: 248 to 208 million years ago. The first dinosaurs and mammals appear.

Jurassic Period: 208 to 146 million years ago. Giant dinosaurs dominate the landscape.

Cretaceous Period: 146 to 65 million years ago. Dinosaurs continue to dominate. The first feathered dinosaurs appear. Dinosaurs go extinct at the end of the period.

Andy Heckert of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science stands next to a model of an arthropleura - a 300-million-year-old insect that could be distantly related to today's tiny millipede.

[Darkchylde]

Hmmmm.... would this have anything to do with YOU?

[Renfield]

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.

[Nowhere Man]

Dang, regular milipedes make me freak out. 8 feet long, I think I'll need an M-60 machine gun or a BAR to take that thing out. B-) A friend of mine told me a story where his father was a M-60 gunner on a chopper in Vietnam, he did encounter a millipede over a foot long over there, he freaked and emptied almost a full belt into it. Later, he was in a crawl space under his home and a regular millipede crawed on his hand and he freaked out there. Those things are nasty. I hate centipedes too. Yuck!

[irish guard]

I bet those suckers taste reeeeeeal goooood.

[P.O.E.]

Give that guy a kazoo and a jug, and I'd bet you'd have a real swingin' sound.

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

If that thing is 8 feet tall then the guy is over 9 feel tall?!

/humor

[tutstar]

Need a jumbo can of Raid for that thing!!

[Hot Tabasco]

Saw one of them suckers in my basement when I turned on the lights. He was too fast for me, by the time I got back from my gun cabinet he had already escaped down the drain......

Now I make it a point to never watch my DVDs in my media room in the basement without being armed......

Maybe that would explain why my dates never come back.

[F.J. Mitchell]

350 billion years ago, people just squished those bugs same as now. Folks had much bigger feet in those days.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It's not an insect. Arthropod though.