Man Sized Sea Scorpion Fossil Found 216
hereisnowhy writes "A giant fossilized claw discovered in Germany belonged to an ancient sea scorpion that was much bigger than the average man, an international team of geologists and archaeologists reported Tuesday. In a report in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, the team said the claw indicates that sea scorpion Jaekelopterus rhenania was almost 2.5 meters long, making it the largest arthropod — an animal with a segmented body, jointed limbs and a hard exoskeleton — ever found. In the report, the authors said the scorpion exceeds previous size records for arthropods by almost half a meter."
Man Sized? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Man Sized? (Score:5, Funny)
Dubious extrapolation (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a look, for example, at this picture [sc.gov] of a Fiddler crab, or even this picture [foodreference.com] of a stone crab, and then scale the "computer-generated visualization" in the article to that claw to body size, and you'll estimate that the guy is, maybe, half a meter long.
Re:Dubious extrapolation (Score:5, Informative)
This is appalling! (Score:2)
Well...I, for one, welcome our new non meme-using slashdot readers.
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I for one welcome our time traveling giant sea scorpion overlords!
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Re:Dubious extrapolation (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been a while since my paleo-biology days, but I have no recollection of asymmetric body structures of any kind of euripterid. A quick search turns up no records of any species with different sized claws. Euripterids are more closely related to scorpions or spiders than crabs anyway. Info here, under classification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelicerata [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Dubious extrapolation.. Hold on... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dubious extrapolation (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Man Sized? (Score:5, Funny)
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At least you can get a beer or wine with your KFC.
Re:Man Sized? (Score:5, Informative)
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http://www.sea-monkeys.com/html/aboutsm/whatarethey.html [sea-monkeys.com]
I would like to see a fish tank full of them!
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Man.. it's ugly, too. Still, though, if they ever came back, they could easily get jobs as French movie stars!
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Maybe the average man was much bigger 300 million years ago.
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Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
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The current widelw-accepted theory is that human predation caused those extinctions in the Americas, which was enabled by the last ice age (from the diaspora of peoples via the north pacific land bridge). Large animals that did not co-evolve with humans were easy prey for voracious hunter-gatherers. Large carnivorous animals followed, due to both reduction of their foo
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If, by widely accepted, you mean that environmental activists try to make people feel guilty by claiming that humans have been destroying their environment since the dawn of civilization.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/011025072315.htm [sciencedaily.com]
Extinctions amongst megafauna during the end of the last ice age are better-attributed to {gasp} the end of the last ice age! Large, heavy-coated, cold-adapted animals couldn't deal with global warming. Stone-age humans were certainly hunting individual mamm
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It's an area of debate, to be sure. My understanding is that (like the mammoth in Eurasia example I used in my OP in this thread) there was negative population pressure from both means -- climate change enabled overkill, but overkill was the ultimate cause of extinction.
Also note that the paper you refer to speaks specifically of the Clovis people of 11000 year
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There were large populations of 4 species of giant ground sloth in North America before humans arrived. They were large powerful creatures with big claws and could easily fend off predators.
However, they were probabbly slow, and easy pickins' for a pack of humans with spears or large rocks.
Eliminating one or two of these species, probabbly interrupted enough of the food chain dependency to accelerate the exti
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Unlikely, given the tendency of current humans to become wider rather than taller :P
Seriously, though, with Earth's gravity, a 15ft human would have to either be very thin or wear an artificial exoskeleton to help support the weight.
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Anyone past that height currently either has back problems, or keeps themselves in decent shape so that their mucles can take some of the load in moderate high-stress situations, like falling over when
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Giraffes seem to get by quite well without the artificial exoskeleton, and they can reach upwards of a ton in weight.
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But they are very thin, and also quadrupeds.
They're also unlikely to become as ubiquitous as humans, since most of the world doesn't have acacia trees for them to graze on (acacia trees that not many other creatures can graze on, because the food is too high up - hence the evolution of the giraffe as a specialist acacia feeder).
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Horse poo. Think about it.
First animal: "Hey! look at those yummy acacia leaves. Too bad they are like 15 feet up there".
Next Generation: "Still looks yummy, too bad it is still 15 feet up there."
Next Generat
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Animal:"Hey! look at those yummy acacia leaves. It's a good thing they're not, like, 15 feet up in the air."
Acacia:"Pesky proto-giraffes! I'll show them. I'll get my offspring to grow a little taller."
Next Gen Animal:"Hey! look at those yummy acacia leaves. It's a good thing they're not, like, 15 feet up in the air. I wonder how Mom and Dad could have reached them, though. They're short!"
Next Gen Acacia:"Pesky proto-giraffes! I'll show them. I'll get my offspring to grow a little
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Mr Dawkins would mod you +5 - Intelligent Design, I'm sure.
The giraffe ancestor, IIRC, is some sort of camel, or at least that's what I dimly remember from my schooldays.
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Next Generation: "Still looks yummy, too bad it is still 15 feet up there."
Except the first generation of giraffes would die out, because they couldn't reach the food. Therefore no evolution due to extinction.
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That's where genetically engineered bones and organs come into play. Seriously, it would take something tremendous (global epidemic, nuclear war, etc.) to make humans humans evolve "naturally." I suspect all our future evolution will be artificial.
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Speaking of giants, they only found 1 of these things, not a whole race of them. How do they know it wasn't the "Andre the Giant" of the sea scorpions?
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eurypterids (Score:2)
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I do like the thouoght of a 40lb lobster claw, I agree eurypterids would probabaly be some tasty eating.
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Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)
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DNA (Score:2, Funny)
Re:DNA (Score:4, Insightful)
I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)
2.5 metres (Score:4, Funny)
Headline (Score:2, Funny)
Wow (Score:2)
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Chris Mattern
Seriously... f@#k that (Score:5, Funny)
I'll tell you what happened..
Whatever sentinent life showed up here a long time ago basically said "return to the ship and nuke the site from orbit"
And you know what? They were right.
Re:Seriously... f@#k that (Score:5, Funny)
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no no no.... (Score:2, Funny)
mmmm....arthropod (Score:2)
Uh oh (Score:3, Funny)
Ants vs Scorpions (Score:5, Funny)
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Is this that unusual? (Score:5, Funny)
Cheers
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Re:Is this that unusual? (Score:5, Funny)
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Now, I'm off to clean my keyboard...
You played way too much to RPGs when... (Score:4, Funny)
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Wait a Minute (Score:3, Insightful)
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Something tells me there's a paleontologist that woke up one day and said "oh fuck it- they'll believe anything we say."
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It's a different species, but a close relative with similar anatomy.
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I'm guessing that when they say they found "a claw" (and show a picture of the rock containing said fossil), it means the other bits are guesswork. Maybe I assume too much.
For all we know, this could have been a lobster, or a crab, rather than a scorpion.
The fact that this creature appeared over 200 million years before crabs and lobsters evolved [wikipedia.org] could be a clue.
Unless they find the whole creature, there's no way of
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Scorpion? Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't "giant lobster" or "giant shrimp" be a better description of a large sea arthropod? Maybe it doesn't sound as exciting, but why would they call it a "sea scorpion" if there is no reason to believe it had the most well-known feature of land scorpions?
Additionally, how do they know it wasn't a much smaller beast with proportionally larger claws, given that according to TFA, one of the leading theories about how and why such a huge arthropod evolved was an "arms race" with early armored fish?
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But where is that in comparison to sea cucumber:land cucumber?
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We can't see it stinging another creature today just as we cannot see the T-Rex eating another dinosaur today. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Radscorpions! (Score:2)
Egads! (Score:2, Redundant)
2nd Fossil Imprint (Score:3, Funny)
That explains it (Score:2)
I was wondering why Nigel Marvin didn't return from his last trip.
we call them land-sea-scorpions. (Score:2, Funny)
Over 2M long? How's that supposed to work? (Score:2)
I was under the impression the the primary limiting factor for the size of an arthropod was the creature's copper-based blood. Copper based blood, when compared to iron based, is a much poorer carrier of oxygen - hence the size of the creature must remain relatively small, else the blood will be depleted of oxygen by the time it reaches the extremities.
Do scorpions, lobsters, shrimp have some form of de-centralized respiratory intake, such that the blood could be re-oxygenated at several sites around the
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Oh no! Quick! (Score:2)
Other large fossil athropods (Score:3, Informative)
Other potential size challengers include the Arthropleura, which was a giant centipede-like critter. Although, it probably lacked the bulk of the sea scorpion.
Another contender was the Anomalocaris, which looked kind of like a giant brine shrimp with two front tenticals. It was the first known "large" preditor. It's one of the odder Cambrian critters. However, it's classification as an arthropod is still up in the air. It may be from an extinct sister phyla to arthropods.
Marketing for Cloverfield movie? (Score:2)
Gives new meaning to... (Score:2)
And that's MR. SHRIMP to you.
Yao Ming / Willie Shoemaker (Score:2)
The problem with these one off fossil finds is, what I like to call, the Yao Ming & Willie Shoemaker problem. For example: if in 100,000 years alien explorers come to Earth long after mankind is gone and dig up only the bones of Willie Shoemaker [wikipedia.org] or Yao Ming [wikipedia.org], they're get a very wrong impression about what average humans look like.
The same problem applies to any animal species we uncover. We cannot assume the average size of a species by a single discovery of remains because they have too high a change o