Newly Discovered Sea Creature Was Once the Largest Animal On Earth 57
sciencehabit writes Almost half a billion years ago, the largest animal on Earth was a 2-meter-long, helmet-headed sea creature that fed on some of the ocean's tiniest prey. The newly described species is one of the largest arthropods yet discovered, a class of animals that includes spiders and crabs. The well-preserved remains of the multisegmented creature are providing clues about how subsequent arthropods' legs may have evolved from the dozens of stubby flaps used to propel this beast through the water.
I've got your (Score:2, Funny)
2-meter-long, helmet-headed creature....
First post :)
Re:I've got your (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, the NFL is full of them.
Re: (Score:3)
Aegirocassis Benmoulae? (Score:5, Funny)
This is the most "Why not Zoidberg" scenario ever.
Re: (Score:1)
Unoriginal, that question is already asked among the comments to TFA.
2-meter-long, helmet-headed sea creature (Score:2, Funny)
The original... (Score:1)
Rock Lobster.
Leviathan (Score:2)
The way humanity is going... (Score:1, Insightful)
.... then pretty soon the largest creature on earth will once again be 2m long - us. Since we seem to find some sort of glee in killing pretty much all the large fauna on this planet.
Cooking (Score:1)
One question I ask myself whenever I see some new creature is "I wonder how it tastes". It's kind of disturbing when watching sci-fi flicks though.
Re: Cooking (Score:3, Interesting)
I've often wondered if they can bring back the dodo or the wooly mammoth if we will domesticate them for food, since both were believed to be hunted to extinction by man, they must be delicious.
Re: Cooking (Score:4, Informative)
The dodo wasn't hunted to extinction, apparently it tasted pretty awful. Introduced pigs and dogs ate its eggs.
Re: (Score:2)
One question I ask myself whenever I see some new creature is "I wonder how it tastes".
Like chicken.
See how easy that was?
More importantly (Score:5, Funny)
For a short time I was the youngest person on earth.
Re: (Score:2)
What happened?
Re: (Score:2)
it depends on whether you take into account relativity...
Wonder how they find such things (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Wonder how they find such things (Score:5, Interesting)
Keep reading this kind of stories. But I wonder how the scientists come to a conclusion, about newer species and all the evolution that might have happened, and make people believe it... just based on theories.
1. You misunderstand what a theory is.
2. The current theory is testable, based on observations and hypotheses, and will be altered as evidence requires. It's certainly better than "God did it", which is not testable, has no observational basis, and the proponents refuse to alter their beliefs based on evidence to the contrary.
Re: (Score:3)
People making extraordinary claims need to present extraordinary evidence. There is NO evidence. On the other hand, there IS evidence that the existence of a god would be incompatible with the basic rules of this universe, so no, as an atheist who makes Richard Dawkins look like a wishy-washy (and he really is an agnostic, not an atheist, btw), all the evidence to date points to god not existing.
Show me SOME evidence, some mathematical proof, and we'll talk. Until then, the numbers do not (and can not) add
Re: (Score:2)
I can't disprove winged flying dragons, but since there is zero evidence for them, I can safely say they don't exist on earth. There might be ants the size of humans, that evolved with titanium composing their body so that they don't collapse under their own weight, but until there's at least a smidgen of evidence, they simply don't exist here either.
Anyone who claims otherwise needs to do more than just make the claim. Let them prove I am wrong about the non-existence of god - or as the preacher would say
What a crock (Score:2)
There is a difference between evidence and proof.
Try saying that in any court - you'll be laughed out. Evidence and proof are synonyms.
And why should I be "more tolerant" of superstition? There is NO evidence or proof that there is a god. You want to believe it, that's your business. However, accept that most religions have blood on their hands.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny how we use evidence to prove or disprove someone's guilt. Evidence is proof - but it's up to the jurors to decide what it proofs.
Or you can just ask google "what is the definition of proof". The first word of the first definition is "evidence".
Re: (Score:2)
You're not so ignorant that you wouldn't accept a god as a possibility, are you?
Just a god? How about an asexually-reproducing giant, a cow licking people into existence, and Earth being created from the corpse of said giant? That sounds reasonable, right? [norse-mythology.org]
Is it possible? I suppose, it's possible. Very very many things are within the realm of possibility. For example, it could be possible that you are the only sentient being ever created, and everything that you are experiencing is nothing more than a fever dream in your mind. That's a possibility. It doesn't seem very likely tho
Re: (Score:1)
the sky is actually the skull of a giant held aloft by 4 dwarves,
FIVE elves.
Heretic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.
Anne Elk
Re: (Score:2)
and make people believe it... just based on theories.
You do know that Gravity is also only a theory?
Minor quibble (Score:2)
Almost half a billion years ago, the largest animal on Earth was a 2-meter-long, helmet-headed sea creature that fed on some of the ocean’s tiniest prey. The newly described species is one of the largest arthropods yet discovered
Now, if it's the largest animal ever on Earth, doesn't that mean it also has to be *the* largest arthropod, and not just one of the largest? Or are there some arthropods that are larger, and also not animals?
Re: (Score:2)
It was the largest animal on earth half a billion years ago.
Since then there have been larger animals, including larger arthropods.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, thank you. That makes more sense.
New question, then: Why is this a big deal? I paid more attention to what I was reading now, and it says that this animal was 1.6 meters long, so it wasn't very big at all. Why is it a big deal that it was the largest animal at the time?
Is it something like, this is the last time that an arthropod was the largest animal on earth? And why is that particularly interesting? For the sake of clarity, I'll explain that I'm not arguing that it's not interesting. It just
Re: (Score:3)
Certainly there have been a *lot* of creatures that were the largest animal on Earth at the time. But there were far, far more that weren't. I would say belonging to that tiny subset of "largest of its time" is a fairly interesting feature, at least where headlines are concerned. From a scientific perspective I'd say the evolutionary insight from the paddles is probably far more interesting, but that's not going to generate nearly as much attention. Lead with the dramatic, and far more people will hear o
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, once I understood the headline and that it wasn't the largest animal ever, the insight about the paddles evolving into limbs seemed more interesting to me, too.
Re:Minor quibble (Score:4, Interesting)
It was the largest [known] animal on Earth at the time, and therefore also the largest arthropod at the time. Bigger arthropods have existed, but they came later. For example, the modern Japanese spider crab [wikipedia.org] could be considered "bigger" (depending on what you're measuring) because it can have an almost 4 meter leg span. And of course, Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] lists Jaekelopterus (2.5 meters), a sea scorpion, and Arthropleura (2.1 meters), a millipede, but they both lived about 100 million years more recently than the species in TFA.
Pokemon? (Score:4, Funny)
In other news... (Score:2)
Bacteria, once the largest creatures on earth, are now the smallest!!