Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

2.5m Water Scorpion Stalks Southern Africa

Posted by Hemos on 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."

6 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Metric System by DonkeyHote · · Score: 0, Interesting

    How big is a meter? I'm an American they don't teach us that kinda stuff.

  2. Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. I don't understand by meggito · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:suggestion to avoid slashdotting these poor sit by psych031337 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.
    --
    +++ath0
  5. King Crab by Perdo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:King Crab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      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...