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After Decades of Debate, Scientists Say These Fossils Belong to the Largest Known Scorpion, Which Lived 415 Million Years Ago
Key takeaways
- Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow
- That’s the finding of a study published on June 2 in the journal Palaeontology, based upon a set of fossils that have been housed in the Natural History Museum in London for more than a century.
- “That is a chonky-looking organism,” Russell Bicknell, a paleobiologist at Flinders University in Australia who was not involved in the work, tells CNN’s Shraddha Chakradhar.
Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow
Add as preferred source Illustration of what Praearcturus gigas may have looked like © Franz Anthony About 415 million years ago, the floodplains of what’s now England and Wales were haunted by a nightmarish predator: a baseball bat-size scorpion, armed with pincers the size of table knives.
That’s the finding of a study published on June 2 in the journal Palaeontology, based upon a set of fossils that have been housed in the Natural History Museum in London for more than a century. In 1870, scientists named the specimens’ species Praearcturus gigas, which they described as a giant isopod, a type of crustacean. But now, the creature has been reclassified as a different arthropod—the largest known scorpion to have ever walked the Earth.