The Tingler.
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."
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!
The Tingler.
(Note: This is a theory.)
If you are "The Crazed Unknown Hermit" is Darks "The Crazed Unknown Hemit"?
Sigh. They don't make'em like that anymore.
but unless you are assuming large amounts of the oxygen was buried, then that doesn't make sense. It's not like we have 10% CO2 floating around now.
Oxygen is reactive and combines with all sorts of other agents. All that extra oxygen is locked up.
Them!
No, it is a hypothesis. A theory has supporting evidence.
More plants meant more oxygen. It's a lot more complex than that, but that's the simple answer.
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.
Compare the atmospheric density on Earth to Venus, or any other planet in the system except Mercury and Mars...
I bet those suckers taste reeeeeeal goooood.
Betcha can't eat just one.
How odd. What I copied and pasted is not what showed up. Alternate universe thingy again...
There is supporting evidence for this theory. Take it up with Dr. Walter Brown, not me.
My greatest creation.
And it calls out cadence as it walks too.
Give that guy a kazoo and a jug, and I'd bet you'd have a real swingin' sound.
/humor
But not from the atmosphere. More plants that deoxidized metals maybe.
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