The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study’s three authors.
“This is an amazing discovery,” he said Tuesday.
“We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were,” he said.
. . .
Braddy said the sea scorpions also were cannibals that fought and ate one other, so it helped to be as big as they could be.
“The competition between this scorpion and its prey was probably like a nuclear standoff, an effort to have the biggest weapon,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of years ago, these sea scorpions had the upper hand over vertebrates — backboned animals like ourselves.”
That competition ended long ago.
But the next time you swat a fly, or squish a spider at home, Braddy said, try to “think about the insects that lived long ago. You wouldn’t want to swat one of those.”
Yahoo News (Thanks Cheryl)
I wonder why AP chose to crop out the giant milipede in the Royal Society graphic? That’s just as creepy as far as I’m concerned.
* Update more here.
Arthropleura!