Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Science

2.5m Water Scorpion Stalks Southern Africa 173

Posted by Hemos from the stalking-the-coastline dept.
MeredihtJT writes: "The giant water scorpion well over two metres long made its way slowly over the sea floor, about 100m to 200m below the surface of the water. It would take another 260 million years for South African Palaentologist, geologist and 'pizza-maker' Roger Smith to find it."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

2.5m Water Scorpion Stalks Southern Africa More

2.5m Water Scorpion Stalks Southern Africa

Comments Filter:

  • Bwhahaha! (Score:5, Funny)

    by susano_otter ( 123650 ) on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:18PM (#3011446) Homepage
    Little does the future Los Angeles know that I have already deployed my own Giant Water Scorpion to attack them in their sleep, millenia hence. Crawl, my pretty! Crawl!

  • nightmarish (Score:3, Funny)

    by SweetAndSourJesus ( 555410 ) <.moc.oohay. .ta. .toboRehTdnAsuseJ.> on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:18PM (#3011449)
    You know, I'm really glad the human race took so long to get here. It was a good idea to wait until crazy shit like this died off. I get freaked out by cockroaches, can you imagine 2 1/2 meter scorpions cruising around your kitchen? That's the stuff nightmares are made from.

  • Ummmmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by Qwerpafw ( 315600 ) on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:21PM (#3011465) Homepage
    Today is apparently the day of the funny postings. Gotta love it.

    2.5m Water Scorpion Stalks Southern Africa
    Tabloid headlines indeed :)

    All I can say is: Where can I get mine?
    • Tabloid headlines indeed :)

      Almost as good as that one from this morning about Taco getting married. I mean, who believes this stuff?
  • How fast do these scorpions have to beat their wings to cross the ocean. With and without the cocoanut.
  • "...but there is good reason to think that it was not a fearsome predator like many of its smaller terrestrial and aquatic relatives"

    If this thing doesn't have a stinging tail and all the stuff that its terrestrial counterparts have, I wonder what it would look like. A big hard-shelled manatee lumbering along through the deep?

    I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi

  • Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Scoria ( 264473 ) <{slashmail} {at} {initialized.org}> on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:25PM (#3011485) Homepage
    CmdrTaco is probably locating submitted articles that reference small, low-bandwidth websites and Slashdotting them to impress Kathleen.

    This one is already gone, apparently.

    (Congratulations, Taco. :p)
    • Nope, they just seem to have a HUGE background image, specifically designed to make their server puke when they get slashdotted.

      • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Actually, IIRC, most African countries still have very slow (at least by US standards) overseas links. Basically, we give them the crappy equipment we don't want anymore. It's entirely possible that we've just Slashdotted an entire country.

        • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

          by Scoria ( 264473 )
          I do believe that John Ashcroft will now refer to Slashdot as a "terrorist entity" if that's indeed factual.

          CmdrTaco and CmdrTacoette, run while you can!
          • i don't think ashcroft would count /. as a terrorist entity until it took out a web site that he cared about.. i mean we are /.ing sites talking about evolution in this case... he might even like the idea...
      • The image also appears to be verticaly interlaced, thus ensuring that RLE or even the more advanced compression used in GIF files is rendered almost compleatly useless.

        (or it might just be my cruddy screen that makes it look interlaced. ^_^ )
  • In an astounding discovery, scientists have found wire trails from parasites sunk into carpeting material in an ancient human inhabitance.

    Humans were tricked into making copies of the box-like plastic and metal parasites and brought the parasites into their dwellings for their usefulness and entertainment. The parasites proliferated, began making copies of themselves, and eventually became the dominant organism on Earth.

  • Speculation as to the cause of extinction. . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:28PM (#3011496)
    seem to center around something known as the dreaded "Slashdot Effect."

    KFG

  • Read the Article? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Accipiter ( 8228 ) on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:30PM (#3011509)
    That's a pretty misleading headline.

    Before I read the article, the post gave me the impression that this monolith was still down there, clawing at South Africa.

    In reality, all they found were trace fossils of its footprints, because it walked the area 260 million years ago.

    In any case, I keep envisioning a bad, B-movie horror flick starring this dude. "Giant Scorpions Attack!", with sequels taking place in different major US cities. I'd almost say I would want to see Samuel L. Jackson saying "hold on to yer butts!" in the movie every time he's about to unleash his genius plan to stop the mutant scorpions, but I doubt he'd do a B flick.

    I wonder if getting stung by a 3 meter scorpion would provide time to be painful. Probably 20-30 seconds or so.

    • Re:Read the Article? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by felipeal ( 177452 )
      In any case, I keep envisioning a bad, B-movie horror flick starring this dude. "Giant Scorpions Attack!"

      Or maybe The Scorpion King [imdb.com]...
    • That's a pretty misleading headline.

      Before I read the article, the post gave me the impression that this monolith was still down there, clawing at South Africa.

      Hey, that's the best (or at least most effective) kind of headline, one that grabs your attention and makes you read the article, even if it isn't as good as what you thought.

      Nonetheless, the image of a prehistoric water scorpion over eight feet long is not too much of a disappointment to me.

      -me

    • Well... (Score:4, Funny)

      by krmt ( 91422 ) <therefrmhere@yah o o . com> on Thursday February 14, 2002 @10:10PM (#3011666) Homepage
      I would want to see Samuel L. Jackson saying "hold on to yer butts!" in the movie every time he's about to unleash his genius plan to stop the mutant scorpions, but I doubt he'd do a B flick.

      Well, he did do Episode I...
    • ...the post gave me the impression that this monolith was still down there, clawing at South Africa.
      A monolith is a large rock, like the grey matter contained in a troll's skull. Incidentally, here's nothing scary about being stalked by a monolith, unless that monolith happens to represent God in a Kubrick film.

      "you keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means"

    • Ladies and gentlemen,

      We just got the story, and what we have read speaks for itself. South Africa has apparently been taken over...conquered, if you will, by a master race of giant scorpions.

      It is difficult to tell at this point whether they will kill the captive South Africans or simply enslave them.

      One thing is for certain; there is no stopping them, the scorpions will soon be here.

      And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I would like to remind them that as a trusted slashdot personality, I could be helpful in rounding up other to toil in their underground sugar caves.

      (later)

      Well, this poster was possibly a little hasty earlier, and would like to reaffirm his allegiance to this country, and it's human president. It may not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have......for now....

      (takes down a poster saying "SCORPIONS RULE")

      (shamelessly ripped from The Simpsons...sorry, I couldnt resist)
    • >I'd almost say I would want to see Samuel L.
      >Jackson saying "hold on to yer butts!" in the
      >movie every time he's about to unleash his
      >genius plan to stop the mutant scorpions, but I
      >doubt he'd do a B flick

      What do you call "Deep Blue Sea"?

      Ewwweeee.

      -l

  • I actually read iol.co.za about every other day, not sure why... I guess I just always wanted to visit South Africa, so I look at their news a lot. I have never seen it so slow, guess that post that spawned the "Is South Africa a Third World Country" debate a week ago here seems to show maybe, just maybe they are? Biggest news sited downed by the slashdot effect....

    So, anyone able to see if it's bandwidth between US/Europe and Africa, or just their server?

    • Maybe it's because of the slashdot effect? Many sites go down because of it, and they are here in America, so how does this make Africa a 3rd world country, when infact South Africa has the most resources and most precious materials on the face of the earth? The gov't and people are fucked up but if you've ever actually been to South Africa, you'd see that it's far from 3rd world. Different, yes. 3rd world?, there are people in Africa that would make Bill Gates look cheap. As for reported income, that'll just get a corrupt gov't to tax you far more than they already do.
      • The term "third world" is pretty much useless; it lumps too many people into one category.

        South Africa isn't a third world country, but neither is it fully modernized; a large segment of the population live in abject poverty.

        And South Africa does NOT have "the most resources" of any country on Earth. That's just insanely wrong. Good grief, it's not even close.

  • Article Text (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tracking an ancient denizen of the deep

    February 13 2002 at 05:05PM

    By John Yeld

    About 260 million years ago, a giant water scorpion well over two metres long made its way slowly over the sea floor, about 100m to 200m below the surface of the water.

    This huge, ancient creature may have been making sweeping, brush-like movements with its right feet, collecting small animals like worms and crustaceans from the sediment which it then "combed" with its left feet, pushing the most desirable prey items towards its mouth.

    As the water scorpion, or eurypterid as its now known to palaeontologists, moved across the sea bottom, it left complex footprints or tracks of its activity in the mud.

    Gradually, the mud was covered by more and more layers of sediment and the thick ash of hundreds of massive volcanic eruptions.

    The find is of major scientific significance
    Eventually, over aeons, the sea itself disappeared, and the land which had surrounded it broke and divided into new continents which drifted apart.

    Millions of years later, while travelling with a group of friends towards the end of November last year, Cape Town-based British palaeontologist John Almond glanced up at a crumbling cliff near Laingsburg in the Karoo and noticed a double set of strange blob-like markings in the rock, starkly outlined in the cross-light of the late afternoon sun.

    Miraculously, the blobs were the tracks left by the water scorpion, perfectly preserved as fossilised rock despite the passing of millions of years and the huge re-arrangement of Earth's surface involving massive geological forces like volcanoes and earthquakes.

    The find is of major scientific significance, because it is the largest invertebrate trackway known in the world, and the eurypterid which made it is the largest arthropod ever recorded.

    (Invertebrates are animals without a backbone. Arthropods are invertebrates with a segmented exoskeleton and numerous paired, jointed appendages, or legs, and include modern crustaceans, insects, spiders and their relatives).

    'Probably about 2,5m long'
    The new discovery is also a rare example of a trace fossil - that is, fossilised behaviour of living organism such as tracks, trails, burrows or feeding marks, which can be confidently attributed to a specific group of animals.

    "Most trace fossils cannot be assigned to particular animal, though we can interpret them in terms of what behaviour was involved," said Almond.

    "Trace fossils record the activity of animals while they were still alive and where they actually lived. Body fossils - shells, skeletons and so on - represent dead organisms, and may be transported away from the habitat of the living animal."

    The trackway occurs in what geologists call the Ecca Group of sediments of the Great Karoo.

    These sediments were laid down in an extensive sea which covered large areas of what was then the supercontinent Pangaea - a single continent comprising all the land mass on Earth - for about 25 million years during the early- to mid-Permian Period (around 280-to-255 million years ago).

    "At this time, southern Africa was situated about 50-70 degrees south of the contemporary equator," Almond said.

    Geochemical evidence suggests that when the new trackway was formed, the Ecca seas ranged from brackish to freshwater, and the climate was cold to temperate and highly seasonal.

    The Laingsburg area is well-known to geologists and palaeontologists, and is often visited to study the Ecca Group of ancient marine sediments.

    So it's something of a paradox that so many knowledgeable people have been through the exact area without noticing the trackway before, said Almond.

    "However, on this occasion, by pure chance - the right time of day, the right season of the year - the late afternoon sunlight on the beds of rock was at just the right angle to highlight a clear double series of large blobs on a bedding plane high up on a cliff-like outcrop.

    "Although we were in a hurry to move on, a quick look through binoculars convinced me the suspicious-looking blobs would be worth a closer look.

    "My first impression was that they were very complex impressions of some sort which appeared to form some fossil trackway.

    "But, if so, it was clearly not made by a tetrapod - a four-legged vertebrate - and it was huge!"

    It was only later when the photographs were developed that Almond realised his find was of exceptional scientific interest and that it should be studied further as soon as possible.

    When he and friends revisited the area shortly after Christmas, they found incontrovertible evidence that the traces were a fossil trackway that extended much further than previously realised.

    Almond explained that eurypterids are a fascinating group of extinct aquatic arthropods from the Palaeozoic Era, which lived some 480 to 260 million years ago.

    "In particular, eurypterids are close relatives, and direct ancestors, of the living and almost exclusively terrestrial arachnids: scorpions, spiders and their kin.

    "Like these, eurypterids were almost exclusively predatory in habits, feeding on living prey such as other arthropods, soft-bodied invertebrates, and fish.

    "The front appendages were often specialised as huge grasping claws or pincers, or bore cage-like arrays of spines for capturing prey.

    "In at least some forms, there may have been a venomous sting at the tip of the tail."

    This spectacular trackway, which consists of two parallel series of complex footprints or tracks, is about one metre wide and extends at least 7m across the surface of a single bed.

    "The eurypterid which made it must have been enormous, probably about 2,5m long, but there is good reason to think that it was not a fearsome predator like many of its smaller terrestrial and aquatic relatives," said Almond.

    Well-preserved details of the newly discovered tracks show that while the animal was walking along the sea bed, it raked through the soft bottom muds, almost certainly foraging for food - probably small worms and crustaceans - using specialised comb-like structures on its limbs.

    These combs are preserved in a much older giant eurypterid specimen collected near Prince Albert in the 1980s.

    The Laingsburg trackway is unusually well-preserved.

    "The excellent preservation of details of the eurypterid tracks is probably due to the fact that they were impressed by the limbs into a viscous muddy substrate through a thin overlying layer of volcanic ash," said Almond.

    "The tracks were then infilled from above by ash as soon as the animal walked on.

    "The ash layer subsequently protected the foot prints in the underlying muddy layer from erosion because the latter was no longer exposed at the surface of the sea bed."

    The Ecca trackway is more complex and interesting than all those previously found in that it was formed by a combination of both locomotion and feeding activities, he said.

    Before the trackway can be properly studied scientifically, the priority is to stabilise and cast the specimen in the field.

    "The bed on which the trace fossil is preserved is cracking up into numerous small blocks of rock and is in danger of disintegrating through erosion, with the resulting loss of this unique specimen," said Almond.

    "There's a fair chance that some of it will be gone after just one more winter."

    A cast is being made this week with the assistance of staff of Iziko-SA Museum.

    "Thereafter, ways of permanently preserving the specimen for posterity will have to be seriously considered."


    • 'Probably about 2,5m long'

      I thought there was a practical upper limit to the size of creatures with exoskeletons? Something about the weight becoming too great.

      ...searching Google... Here [google.com] it is:

      Animals with an exoskeleton are limited in size because as the exoskeleton becomes larger to accommodate the heavier animal, there is less space for the internal organs.

      I also thought that modern crustaceans were near that limit. If so, isn't this bigger than that?

      Milalwi

  • Eurypterid Park (Score:3, Funny)

    by Skirwan ( 244615 ) <skerwin@mac.cLAPLACEom minus math_god> on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:38PM (#3011550) Homepage
    I can only hope that before they went extinct one of these beasts was trapped in amber, and that somewhere on some privately-owned tropical island a group of scientists funded by a megalomaniacal millionaire are standing on the shoulders of geniuses and thinking more about whether they could than whether they should...

    --
    Damn the Emperor!
  • Is this a corporate payoff advertisement for the upcoming Scorpion King movie? What's next? A giant quidditch ball fossil off the coast of Asia?

  • Another page (Score:3, Informative)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:49PM (#3011588) Homepage Journal
    Here's an interesting page [dispatch.co.za] on the same topic. Note that water scropions have only a superficial resemblance [naturegrid.org.uk] to their landbound namesakes [si.edu] and aren't particularly nasty.

    • Re:Another page (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kotetsu ( 135021 )
      While you did find references to the modern insect sometimes called a water scorpion, it is not at all what is being referred to here. Water scorpion is an alternative name for sea scorpion, both common names for the eurypterids [arizona.edu]. One type of them also happens to be the state fossil [geobop.com] of New York. While we probably can't say with real certainty just how nasty they might have been, I'd certainly be cautious around any 2 meter long, predatory arthropod.
      • I seem to recall (I mean read somewhere -- I wasn't actually there) that everything was bigger in those days. I doubt if a two-meter insect (sea scorpions are actually insects, unlike land scorpions, which are arachnids) would be very conspicuous.

    • Re:Another page (Score:4, Funny)

      by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Friday February 15, 2002 @07:08AM (#3012946) Homepage

      I found this interesting artist's impression [scanartcentral.net] of how the giant fossil creature may have looked.

      • Dummie! (Score:2)

        by fm6 ( 162816 )
        That's Cthulu Junior, AKA "Doctor Zoidberg". I think he's actually a kind of mollusc, though he's known to pose as an anthropod.

  • No, you can't have one (Score:5, Informative)

    by sam_handelman ( 519767 ) <samuel...handelman@@@gmail...com> on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:53PM (#3011604) Journal
    Before anyone even starts with the Jurassic park stuff, it is not possible.

    260 Million years is long enough for every carbon atom in a piece of bone several feet thick to exchange for silicon. Time(absolute) =~ 20,000 Million yrs.; we're talking about 1% of the age of the universe here, guys. It is a very, very long time.

    So, even if you did recover something that looked like a biological molecule from a sample of this thing, all of the information content would have been destroyed long, long ago.

    Scorpion growth factors, on the other hand, are well understood. In a strict sense, genetically modified scorpions are more like a modern scorpion that the one in the article. However, they are nearly as cool, they give you some idea of how such a creature may have lived, and you can feed fools to them when they've foiled your plans for the last time.

    So, if anyone wants an eight foot long scorpion, I've started making them and I - Get away! No, no, I am your master! Aieeeee!

    Anyway, this critter is weird but it pales in comparison to the real freaky shit in the burgess shale. [ucalgary.ca] If you want to know what body types evolution has abandoned (but might take up elsewhere in the galaxy?) check this out. It is a must read for anyone with an interest in writing 'hard' science fiction with aliens in it.

    "Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aarrggh'. He'd just say it!" - King Arthur Pendragon
    • The DNA in Jurassic Park came from specimens encased in amber; amber is carbon based. Amber deposits have been dated back to the Caboniferous period; this is the period preceding the Permian (260 m.y. ago).

      Eurypterids started to rise to dominance during the Ordovican Period (Burgess Shale formation is Cambrian which was before the Ordovician) and peaked during the Silurian Period (next Period). The initial eurypterids were rather small. By the time of the Permian, they had grown in size by one or two orders in magnitude.

      Eurypterids disappeared at the Permian extinction. Then came the Mesozoic, and the dinos.

      It is more educational to look at the evolution of some of these Burgess Shale critters after the Cambrian; check out triobites. Additionally, the body shapes of the critter are not that unusual as many have modern day analogs.
      • The point I was making was that over 260 million years, carbon atoms would have experienced events sufficiently energetic to allow exchange with silicon over several FEET of distance. The events that cause chemical damage to the DNA are considerably less energetic, and they can occur anywhere in the specimen, not just on the surface where the specimen is exposed to rock. Any sample which is old enough to be a fossil is going to have meaningless DNA.

        Over the course of 260 million years, all information content in the DNA would be lost; there might (if it were preserved in Amber, and not in something silicous) be things in the sample that looked like DNA, however, in a process very similar to what happens to old magnetic storage media (random bit flips eventually destroy the data) random chemical changes in the DNA would, absolutely and under any circumstance short of a vacuum at 2 Kelvin, have eroded or altered enough of the bases (after 260 million years, all of them) that recovering any information about the original sequence would be impossible.
    • Every time I am reminded of the Burgess shale I think of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the "Great Race of Yith". That multi-tubular bag of protoplasm *must* have been the inspiration for this bit of the Mythos cannon. Thanks for the reminder (shudder...) S.H. Rev. G
    • IANAP(aleontologist), but I've read/heard that some of Walcott's conclusions in regards to the Burgess Shale site are highly suspect, and Grould's extensions of this work are even more suspect (read "poorly supported").

      IIRC, the source for this info was a PBS documentary disucssing common formations of body styles (segments, legs, heads, etc.).

      Clearly this doesn't discount all of the work, but just something to keep in mind.
  • Paleozoic Park What could possibly go wrong creating a park of extinct giant water scorpions??
  • I'm thinking that Slashdot should temporarily mirror the smaller sites it links to. This slashdot effect is getting ridiculous. Sometimes they don't even last five minutes under the load of traffic that's directed their way.
    • Sometimes they don't even last five minutes under the load of traffic

      ...nor would slashdot...

      Seriously, the expansion of the pipe and the server farm needed to accomodate the mirroring of all of the links posted in stories would pretty quickly ruin OSDN (who own and fund /. last time i checked). Maybe someone could code a google applet (they are still running this programming contest, right?) that checks on /. once a minute and automatically refreshes the cache for the links posted in new stories. And then posts a comment with google cache links that could be used as a mirror even *before* the server is hammered to a clinical death.

  • I don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)

    by meggito ( 516763 ) <npt23@drexel.edu> on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:56PM (#3011615) Homepage
    What makes them beleive that these fossilized footprints are directly related to a scorpion that they have no other proof of?
    They talk about finding the fossil and how it means there was a giant scorpion, but not once does it say why they beleive that these trails were left by some giant scorpion. Why do these two long blobs automatically belong to a giant scorpion? Did they find a fossil? Was there some semblance between these footprints and a common day scorpion? They find an impression of a giant tail? I see absolutely 0 in any way tieing the footprints to a scorpion.

    • Don't worry; they do. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Friday February 15, 2002 @01:20AM (#3012289) Homepage
      How do they know it's a giant scorpion? Because they're god-damned smart, that's how.

      Seriously, I'm not being a smart-ass. Have you ever watched a documentary on these people? They're incredible. They'll be at some site, and the paleontologist will come across what looks like a tiny white rock stuck in the ground, and he'll exclaim "Wow! It looks like the pelvis of a juvenile stegosaurous!" And you say "How the hell does he know that?" and then they dig up the fossile, and what do you know... Juvenile stegosaur. Sometimes they actually explain how they figure this stuff out... And while the conclusion seemed odd at the time, by the time they're done explaining, you're sorry you ever doubted them because they're god-damn smart. Frankly, I have no trouble believing that this guy recognized the tracks of an ancient scorpion on sight.

      Though to more directly answer your question -- I'm sure this isn't the -very first- evidence of ancient, giant scorpions they've found. So basically, they're going off what they already know, and this fossil expands that knowledge.

      You should watch more Discovery Channel. It's the best thing on TV.
      • Except for the 75% fiction that is the dinosaur series...

        I'm sorry, but with the blatant guessing they presented as fact there...wow. The show looked like it might be interesting at first, but then I just decided to go rent Land Before Time. It's free at Family Video, (hey, it's a kiddie movie), and I can rewind it if I miss something. (This was all before I got my TiVo, of course.) =)
      • Yeah, they're so smart they didn't even see evidence of a young earth smacking them in the face.

        Miraculously, the blobs were the tracks left by the water scorpion, perfectly preserved as fossilised rock despite the passing of millions of years and the huge re-arrangement of Earth's surface involving massive geological forces like volcanoes and earthquakes.

        Noooooo, perfectly preserved because they were made only a few thousand years ago. Perfectly preserved because powerful currents from a giant flood of biblical proportions dumped a pile of sediment on them before they could lose their shape. The process of fossilization occurs rapidly [dinosauria.com] and has been observed both in the laboratory and in nature. (The motto of the linked site is: Your window into the Mesozoic. Can you see the incredible, widespread myopia of our culture?) It begins within months and is usually complete in a number of years (usually less then ten) depending on the environment. This is widely known and documented fact, not theory.

        More breathless myopic statements:

        Article by Jame E. Francis. "Arctic Eden," Natural History, January 1991, p.57 and 60:

        "The remains of lush forests near the North Pole give a glimpse of the Arctic's subtropical past....Despite the passage of 45 million years, the wood retains its original color and is still flexible and burns easily. I quickly discovered that my geologic hammer was useless for collecting samples of the fossil wood; the next season I came better prepared with wood saws."

        How do you think a magnolia leaf would change as the result of having been buried for 17-20 million years? Consider this remark from Nature, V.344, April 12, 1990, p. 587:

        "When rocks containing these fossils are cleaved open, the freshly exposed leaf tissues are often bright green or 'deep autumnal' in colour, though they rapidly curl away from the substrate as they oxidize and dry out."

        The author says that it was even possible to isolate the DNA of the leaves:

        "But even the most optimistic estimate of the longevity of this molecule would not have predicted that fragments of substantial length would survive after tens of millions of years at the bottom of an ancient lake." (p. 587)

        The Discovery Channel needs to have the same disclaimer that Miss Cleo has. For entertainment purposes only.

        • Perfectly preserved because powerful currents from a giant flood of biblical proportions dumped a pile of sediment on them before they could lose their shape.
          Thats right. The impact of powerful currents caused them not to be disturbed. Thats exactly what powerful currents do, leave everything completely unruffled.
      • I'll tell you right now, they're not half so smart as you think they are. These are the same people who found a farmer's old pig graveyard and heralded it as the discovery of the missing link. Oh, the embarrassment at discovering that they had re-arranged the bones incorrectly and mis-dated them by a couple million years, and that all they really had were 50 year old pig bones. This happens with fairly moderate frequency, and those are just the times they get caught. There are countless examples of "scientists" who make wild claims that sound halfway reasonable to an uneducated populous.

        You see, when you devote your life to digging up little pieces of old stuff, it's fairly natural to find yourself saying really silly things from time to time. Fortunately, 99% of all people are too lost in the mumbo-jumbo big words they use to really pay attention to how absolutely inane the things they're saying are.

        Next thing you know, we're teaching to our children as law a theory which has only the weakest of circumstantial evidence, mostly made up by people who have spent their lives looking at little pieces of stone and claiming that it's really a stegasaurus.

      • I agree! Anyone who "knows their stuff" has no problem knowing what they see.

        Here's my example.

        I'm climbing through this cave with some friends near Cave City, CA, and slowly and carefully, downclimbing a 90 foot pit to see an indian skull at the bottom.

        We arrived at the bottom of the pit, and while waiting for some stragglers, I decided to have a look around and discovered a tooth. So I hold it up to my caver/dentist buddy and say "look what I found."

        He grabs it out of my fingers, looks at it for a few seconds, while twisting it, looking at all sides, and announces, "It's a lower left bicusped from a female between the ages of 13 to 16.".

        We were all blown away by the sureness of his identification, but we knew he was right, even though he didn't know WHY we were all excited by his announcement.

        You see, earlier in the day, before our dentist buddy was around, the cave owner whom I'm aquainted with, told us that when he bought the land, that along with it came an indian legend about a indian maiden who hadn't found a mate, so she went into this cave in search of the "marriage" spirit that supposedly dwelled there.

        Well, she was never heard from again. My friend started to do a systematic search of his cave, and found an ancient skull and other human remains in the mud at the bottom of the 90 foot pit.

        Then he invited some archaeologists from some college (can't remember which) and they identified the skull as belonging to a girl/woman between 13 and 20 years old! The skull dated to about 900 years ago. But the dentist didn't know any of this this, so he was the man of the hour that day.

        People that know their stuff are fun to learn from.


    • You seem to be unclear on the timescale. It is not a "giant scorpion" like the ones from "Clash of the Titans". These were creatures that lived 480 to 260 million years ago and were quite different from scorpions.
      "eurypterids are close relatives, and direct ancestors, of the living and almost exclusively terrestrial arachnids: scorpions, spiders and their kin."
      Did they find a fossil? Yes. They found the eurypterid's foot and claw prints.
      fossil: noun
      1 : a remnant, impression, or trace of an organism of past geologic ages that has been preserved in the earth's crust
      Also; "These combs are preserved in a much older giant eurypterid specimen collected near Prince Albert in the 1980s."

  • How many? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Max the Merciless ( 459901 ) on Thursday February 14, 2002 @09:57PM (#3011621) Homepage
    Does this giant scorpian have 5 asses?
  • This huge, ancient creature may have been making sweeping, brush-like movements with its right feet

    Maybe it's simpler than than. Imagine yourself 250m years ago. Your a sea roach. On valentines day. Alone

    ...collecting small animals like worms and crustaceans from the sediment which it then "combed" with its left feet

    Valentine "Toys".

    pushing the most desirable prey items towards its mouth.

    Well, maybe not that alone.

  • pizza maker? (Score:3, Funny)

    by JonWan ( 456212 ) on Thursday February 14, 2002 @11:08PM (#3011858)
    Hmmmm Giant scoripion, and a pizza-maker. Sounds like it might be a hit in Japan.
  • Now all we need is a crazy scientist who can clone DNA and a millionaire entrepeneur to create a park. We can bring tourists, and we can somehow let the animals escape. That'll be sooooo cool.
  • The part I found most interesting was that the creature seemed to be 'handed'... it "may have been making sweeping, brush-like movements with its right feet, collecting small animals like worms and crustaceans from the sediment which it then "combed" with its left feet, pushing the most desirable prey items towards its mouth." Of course, I'm presuming the reason they mention the right side and the left side is because it's could be supported by the trial evidence.

    What's interesting is that scorpions are built pretty symetrically [si.edu], like humans (at least externally - the internal organs that we only have one of are all over the place). I wonder if all the creatures were "right sweepers", or were they mostly "right sweepers" (as 90% of people are right-handed), or if it's a 50-50 toss up (like in lobsters).

    Check out a quote from this site [orst.edu]:

    In the cursher claw the closer muscle is composed entirely of slow fibers, and in the cutter claw it has 65 to 75 percent fast fibers and 25 to 35 percent slow fibers. While claw placement in the adult is essentially random, it can be demonstrated in two ways that the muscle fiber properties are not genetically fixed: (i)if one claw is removed in the fourtyh and early fifth stages, the remaining closer muscle develops all slow muscle fibers, and *ii) if the animals are raised in smooth-bottomed containers, both claws can become cutter types, having closer muscles with more than 50 percent fast fibers. Thus, as in vertebrate skeletal muscle, the proprties of lobster closer muscle fibers can be transformed by various experimental manipulations.


    Sure wish I had one of these guys to study and play with, not just their tracks! (ok, maybe not play ball with, but you get the idea)
  • giantwaterscorpionse.cx
  • SW Ohio, near Washington Courthouse, is noted because ~1 meter eurypterid fossils have been found there. That probably makes it the very late Ordovician or very early Devonian period. I never chased down the location, which is probably on private land, when I lived in the Cincinnati area. If anyone wants to look into searching for the fossils, you might be able to get some information from the Geology Department at the U. of Cincinnati.

    BTW. A headline that states "... stalks South Africa" rather than "... stalked South Africa" is really cheap shit.
  • Was he exited about this??

  • King Crab (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Friday February 15, 2002 @07:42AM (#3013009) Homepage Journal
    What happened to the theory that a creature with a chitinous exoskeleton could not support it's own weight if it was much bigger than a modern day king crab? King Crabs are maybe 2 meters across and 25 pounds at best. Once out of the water, an exoskeleton can support much less weight otherwise we would be overrun by 25 lb cockroaches.
    • Once out of the water, an exoskeleton can support much less weight
      so? they never do leave the water.

    • Re:King Crab (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      because the an exoskeleton underwater doesn't have to support much weight... the blue whale's skeleton doesn't have to support it. as for cock roaches Camp lejeune, NC had a 12 inch cockroach that had to be shot with a 9mm. Don't know how much it weighed tho...

  • Big O? (Score:2)

    by skroz ( 7870 )
    What, Mega Deuses weren't enough? Now he's got to hunt scorpions? Good career move, Roger!

  • Want to see one? (Score:2, Informative)

    by yndrd ( 529288 )
    Go to the Smithsonian. At the Museum of Natural History, they've got a mock-up (and a fossilized segment) of one of these bad boys the size of a largish coffee table. "Scorpion" is something of a misnomer, of course--the thing doesn't have a long curled tail.

    Still, it scares the hell out of me every time I go there, imagining that thing coming clicking out of the ocean at me.

  • Is it... (Score:2, Funny)

    by pokeyburro ( 472024 )
    Is it an EEEEEEVIL giant water scorpion??
  • A bottom-dwelling aquatic filter-feeding crustacean. To all intents what we have here isn't a scorpion. It's a lobster.
  • Before going off on the weight limit issue, lets consider its living environment: Underwater!
    Crabs often crawl up on the beach, out of the water. Obviously, the size limit is proportional to the weight, but in this case, the weight is proportional to this creatures weight and buoyancy. The underwater exoskeleton weight limit would be much larger than the one for today's creatures that come out of the water.
  • ...[checks usage manual]...Yep! "Stalks" is _present_ tense, just like I thought...

  • "The eurypterid which made it must have been enormous, probably about 2,5m long, but there is good reason to think that it was not a fearsome predator like many of its smaller terrestrial and aquatic relatives," said Almond.

    Well-preserved details of the newly discovered tracks show that while the animal was walking along the sea bed, it raked through the soft bottom muds, almost certainly foraging for food - probably small worms and crustaceans - using specialised comb-like structures on its limbs.


    Yeah, sure, that COULD have been what was going on. Or maybe there had just been a HUGE party because five or so of the 30-foot variety scorpions had killed a herd of mega-ichthyosaur and they were making the LITTLE guy sweep up!

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close