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2.5m Water Scorpion Stalks Southern Africa
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."
These would make nice pets.
Duun-uh...
Duuunn-uh...
Duuuuuuun-uh...
Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun!
It was probably tasty. Scorpions have a zing that you just don't get outside of the pepper genus.
All I got to say is... yeouch!
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!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
How big is a meter? I'm an American they don't teach us that kinda stuff.
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?
IT IS NOT A SCORPION
IT IS GLAM ROCK SUPERHEROES SCORPIONS!!!
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
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
CmdrTaco is probably locating submitted articles that reference small, low-bandwidth websites and Slashdotting them to impress Kathleen.
:p)
This one is already gone, apparently.
(Congratulations, Taco.
Do you like German cars?
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.
seem to center around something known as the dreaded "Slashdot Effect."
KFG
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.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
THERE ARE GIANT WATER SCORPIONS IN OUR TOILETS!
What are we going to do?!
So, anyone able to see if it's bandwidth between US/Europe and Africa, or just their server?
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."
I am one can short of a six pack!
That 2.5m scorpion is under there harvesting cod sperm for beauty products.
No really, it is!
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
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?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
With it being that large, it could be a European in Africa
until 260,000,000 years later, my future 1,000,000th generation grandson finally find it.
We only have average human life span of 85 years.
Here's an interesting page on the same topic. Note that water scropions have only a superficial resemblance to their landbound namesakes and aren't particularly nasty.
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. 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 good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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.
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.
Does this giant scorpian have 5 asses?
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
Well, he did do Episode I...
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
... a lost postal worker?
Live web cams
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
Maybe it's simpler than than. Imagine yourself 250m years ago. Your a sea roach. On valentines day. Alone
Valentine "Toys".
pushing the most desirable prey items towards its mouth.
Well, maybe not that alone.
Dipped in fresh melted butter, with a slice of lemon. For dinner, a large dallop of petridied dinosaur vomit.
Hmmmm Giant scoripion, and a pizza-maker. Sounds like it might be a hit in Japan.
This news just in, Osama Bin laden is now rumored to be cloning extinct scorpions to terrorise the united states of america.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Slashdot. News for nerds. Stuff that matters. Which category does this one fit into?
"you keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means"
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.
Adam Venus tried to fuck one of these.
i thought there were crabs today that were that size or bigger.
http://www.vlewis.net/page2a.html
the giant spider crab apparently has been 3.7m.
My friend has to fill it in, basically it has cool skulls for claws, head and stinger, then its gonna be mechanized.
On my back, I'm getting a full work:fallen angel with his eyes covered by his hand, fresh with wings cut by a female a angel, and below him a demon reflection of his in a pool.
God spoke to me
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
What's interesting is that scorpions are built pretty symetrically, 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:
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)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
giantwaterscorpionse.cx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
...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
+++ath0
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.
Well, yes, the site was "slashdot'ed". Our ISP actually had us capped to a 180k International bandwdith. We've complained, and they've removed it. So the site should be a tad faster. Regards.
Was he exited about this??
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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 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.
What, Mega Deuses weren't enough? Now he's got to hunt scorpions? Good career move, Roger!
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Than
"Wierd Bumps Found on Rock"
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
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.
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.
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 an EEEEEEVIL giant water scorpion??
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
A bottom-dwelling aquatic filter-feeding crustacean. To all intents what we have here isn't a scorpion. It's a lobster.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Sounds more like a Grendel cluster! :)
The content providers are listening. Freerepublic.com was sued by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post over the whole-article copying that went on.
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
God is an invention of man, not the other way around. Is that myopia, or, your opium you're speaking about?
"Better than heroin they reckon"
It would be nice to have a "google.com" user in
/.
I bet it would be the greatest karma whore of all
time.
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.
LOTR: Elijah Wood is a munchkin asshat. Yes, asshat. LOL.
Unfortunately, what the good Lord giveth in college, He taketh away in sunday school!
...[checks usage manual]...Yep! "Stalks" is _present_ tense, just like I thought...
Liberty uber alles.
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!
Liberty uber alles.