Man Sized Sea Scorpion Fossil Found

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."

Comments

Re:Dubious extrapolation

[aeroelastic]

Actually, with fossils, you sometimes have to do a lot of extrapolation. Very often you only find bone fragments or shell parts, especially with rare species. Euripterid fossils are relatively common, and the different species (300+) are fairly well documented. It is not a stretch to get a reasonably accurate length measurement based on one part. It would be similar to estimating human height based on hand size.

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