Posted on 11/30/2005 10:45:57 PM PST by mastercylinder
The footprints of one of the most fearsome creatures ever found in the British Isles — a water scorpion the length of a person — have been discovered in Scotland.
Tracks in rock on the east coast of Scotland were created 330 million years ago by the six-legged Hibbertopterus, which was 1.6m (5ft 3in) long and 1m (3ft 3in) wide. The water scorpion, which is distantly related to its small modern cousins, had two claw-like arms, an armoured exoskeleton and a powerful tail tipped with a large, flat spike — although it was not poisonous.
“I think it would have been a pretty fearsome sight,” said Martin Whyte, of the University of Sheffield, a geologist who found the tracks. Despite its formidable appearance, the creature would have presented little threat to people. It fed on smaller prey such as water fleas and as an aquatic animal would have been easy to outrun on land. The discovery, published today in the journal Nature, is the first of its kind in the world.
ping
but how did it taste?
Like lobster. Sadly drawn butter was 329,997,000 years in the future...
An ancestor of Helen Thomas?
No....this was Helen's younger sister. May she rest in peace.
LOL
bookmark
Yeah, but could it rock you like a realy old hurricane ?
Some of the ones from the Burgess Shale were on the order of eight feet long. More water bug than I'd want to mess with...
Pretty cool.
The linked site states "last ones went extinct in the Permian."
That seems to directly contradict their linked posting about Carboniferous scorpions:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/arthropoda/arachnida/scorpiones.html
The one in the article is from mid-Carboniferous, almost on the Pennsylvanian/Missisippisan boundary, 40M years before the Permian.
"The Silurian scorpions appear to have lived in the water, since their fossils have gills, but by the Carboniferous scorpions with such features are no longer found -- fossils from the Pennsylvanian age Mazon Creek beds have book lungs covered by protective plates, and so were probably land-dwellers."
I am confuzzled.
Not really:
Youngest to oldest periods in the Paleozoic Era:
Permian
Pennsylvanian
Mississippian (unless you are not American, then the Pennsylvanian and Mississippian are combined to make the "Carboniferous")
Devonian
Silurian
Ordovician
Cambrian
You have to eat a lot of water fleas to grow to that size (Unless, of ocurse, the fleas were the size of a softball).
I would have screamed like a little mid-Carboniferous b*tch.
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