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:Amazing

[gEvil (beta)]

Nobody does. It's believed that the last ice age killed off many larger versions of creatures that are very similar to what we have today. Think pony:horse comparisons, but where our modern day horses were considered the "ponys".

Dubious extrapolation

[Geoffrey.landis]

It's pretty dubious. You can't extrapolate the size of the animal from the size of a claw. Many arthropods today-- lobsters, fiddler crabs, stone crabs-- have an enlarged claw. Particularly if sexual selection acts on the size of the claw ("that guy has a really big one. Ooh! He must be fierce").

Take a look, for example, at this picture of a Fiddler crab, or even this picture 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.