British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever, at two metres long.

The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought.

Eurypterids, or ancient sea scorpions, are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of today's scorpions and possibly all arachnids, a class of joint-legged, invertebrate animals, including spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks.

The fossil was from a Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae, a kind of scorpion that lived only in Germany for about 10 million years, about 400 million years ago.

Sea scorpions also were cannibals that fought and ate one other. Competition between this scorpion and its prey was like a nuclear standoff, an effort to have the biggest weapon.
go

Yuck, two meters long
Reminds me a movie about giant roach having millions baby roaches and attacking a village

The reason why they were so LARGE is because the earth before was soo rich in oxygen than now.

You know, for those of use that are "Bug-Phobic" and panic when they see a small fly, this is not a good thing to think about...

Ewwww. DOn't come in my house!

Or it's a lot smaller but just happned to have a big claw. I tend to be sceptical of claims based on "pieces" for what the whole looked like.

Good point lol i'd be terrified!

This creature was also aquatic and thus had a whole lot easier time supporting its weight. This was also probably before a lot of vertebrate predators came onto the scene, those're the dominant predators now that grow to the biggest sizes (excluding things like giant squid).

Its true that there was a period of time when oxygen was probably higher - but theres been large variations over geological time.

I agree with both of you,I think you are both on the right track.Yeah probably the oxygen had a place in that archaeological phenominon.Although it isnt nessisarily all just about that.

hate to ask but how long is two meters in feet?

6.56168 feet

Need more than a can of raid for that

I have always pondered something as time goes by animals and people change and adapt according to their surrounding environment and lifestyle, and of course as we go BACK in time things have a more simple design and are more "primordial". so what was the original structure of an animal? to see the first, basic structure of an animal I believe we could learn a lot about life perhaps. Would it be a simplistic flawless design? the ORIGINAL, the first. hmm just food for thought

well time to get out the big boots

lol, instead of bug bombs you need nuclear bug bombs and still you might have problems lol

This is actually a very interesting question!

In my most recent bio course we did a lot of phylogenetic analysis and talked a lot about the evolutionary relationships between organisms. This, combined with some stuff from an embryology book I have, actually lets us answer some of this question.

It kind of depends on what you mean by "animal". If you count sponges as animals (they're counted within the animal kingdom phylogenetically, as they are actually reasonably closely related to us) then the common ancestor of all animals was probably just a colony of cells using flagella to push water over it's surface and strain food out. Sponges just got more specialized in performing this task, getting bigger and more efficient at it. There's also a whole group of single-celled organisms closely related to the animals, called choanoflagellates, that have a similar lifestyle.

If you count jellyfish and other cnideria, we can infer that traits and developmental patterns common to all the animals in the group were present in the common ancestor. These include starting out as a hollow ball of cells which folds in on itself and gets a mouth, and not much else. It would've been pretty simple.

If you only count the animal phyla that are bilaterally symmetrical (this includes echinoderms like starfish, their larvae are bilateral) things are more intersting. It might not look like it, but ALL of these animals, including us, are segmented. When we develop, we get blocks of tissue called somites that develop in a similar way to the segments of arthropods. They are heavily modified during development and by the time we're more than a few weeks along in gestation all that remains to show of our own segmentation is the layout of our spinal column, and the way certain muscles of ours are actually two smaller muscles from separate somites that fused together during development. The homeobox genes that control deveolpmental layout in ALL animals also have similar patterns of expression in everything from humans to fish to flies. Looking at the ways those genes have been duplicated and rearranged in different organisms, we can see what original set of genes could've easily given rise to the sets that all these different types of animals now have.

There is a picture somewhere out there on the interwebs of the conjecture for what the common ancester of all modern bilaterians could've looked like, based on what were the most likely original traits and homeobox gene layouts. I will post it as soon as I find it.

Yum look at all of these huge insects!

I for one welcome our new Scorpian overlords.

very interesting.............................that scorpion will have more power.................................