By IANS
London : A giant fossilised claw of an ancient sea scorpion has been found in Germany, and scientists believe the scorpion itself was some 2.5 metres long — much taller than the average man.
The find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.
“This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realised, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were,” said Simon Braddy of the University of Bristol, co-author of an article about the find.
The article has been published online in the journal Biology Letters.
The claw was discovered by one of Braddy’s co-authors, Markus Poschmann, in a quarry near Prüm in Germany.
The claw is from a sea scorpion of the eurypterid family called Jaekelopterus rhenaniae that lived between 460 and 255 million years ago.
The claw is 46 centimetres long, indicating that the sea scorpion to which it belonged was around 2.5 metres long — almost half a metre longer than previous estimates for these arthropods.
Eurypterids are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of scorpions and possibly all arachnids, the family to which spiders belong.
Some geologists believe that giant arthropods evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others, that they evolved in an “arms race” alongside their likely prey, the early armoured fish.