Posted on 04/22/2005 12:50:39 PM PDT by demlosers
Spectacular specimen: This bug's a big one - 8 feet long - and New Mexico scientists nabbed some of its fossils
Think mosquitoes and millipedes are nasty?
Then don't look too deeply into New Mexico's past.
Today, you can squish the tiny bugs, but 300 million years ago, 8-foot-long millipedes were in control of the landscape, and humans weren't even a gleam in evolution's eye.
New Mexico is now a world record holder of such "exquisitely grotesque creatures," as one worker at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science calls them. Evidence of the largest arthropleura - its technical name - ever found was recovered by the museum on Friday.
"In today's world, you couldn't have a bug this big," said Spencer Lucas, paleontology curator at the museum. "This is basically the Tyrannosaurus of the Pennsylvanian period, millions of years before dinosaurs evolved. If you took a time machine back, you'd definitely want to check your sleeping bag for these suckers before getting in."
The Pennsylvanian time period lasted from 325 to 280 million years ago.
The museum has not found the bug itself. What it did find in a remote canyon near Española were the fossilized tracks of such a creature - which looks like a 3-by-8 speed bump with flat wings holding hundreds of nasty, ribbed, horseshoe-shaped feet.
"This is a very spectacular thing," said Adrian Hunt, director of the museum, who went out in the field with the team to recover it. "Think of it as a much bigger cross between a millipede and a centipede. It probably lived in swampy forest debris. Something like this has never been found before in the Western United States."
Evidence of the creatures has also been found in Nova Scotia and Scotland, but Jorg Schneider, an international expert on them and a paleontologist from the Freiberg Mining Academy in Germany, said New Mexico's find is evidence of the biggest arthropleura ever.
The second-largest creature was probably a few inches smaller than the one found in New Mexico. The New Mexico track is 39.3 centimeters wide, compared with the second-largest track, in Scotland, which is 36 centimeters wide, Schneider said.
Schnieder came to New Mexico for a two-week visit to look at the track and other New Mexico rocks from the same time period, he said.
"One question we have is, could such a large beast live on plant material only?" Schneider said. "In millipedes from the modern era, we know that scolopender (a type of millipede) is a predator. Possibly these big extinct versions also ate other animals. This was the top of the food chain - with no natural enemy - for about 40 to 50 million years during the Pennsylvanian."
The creatures might have been vegetarians, but their large size suggests they might have eaten early reptiles that later evolved into dinosaurs and mammals, Schneider said.
One favorite snack could have been the pelycosaur, a relative of the dimetrodon, a small, sail-backed lizard common in that age, Lucas said.
"We're still really not sure what they ate," Lucas said. "This guy was probably out patrolling the forest floor eating smaller bugs - which were still pretty big by today's standards - and maybe eating small vertebrates. New Mexico was near the equator then, and the land was much warmer and wetter."
Arthropleura died out at the end of the Pennsylvanian, probably because the amount of oxygen in the air was reduced from 30 percent during that time period to closer to the 21 percent we have today, Lucas said.
"They just couldn't survive at that size in modern air," Lucas said. "Their lungs weren't as evolved as ours. For an insect to get that big, you'd need to have a lot more oxygen in the air. These guys were an evolutionary dead end."
Millipedes and centipedes aren't directly related to arthropleura, he added, but might be from a related branch of the now-extinct creature's family tree, Lucas added.
"Breathing, food, locomotion are all problematic for a bug that big," Lucas said. "When the world changed, they just couldn't adapt."
The creeping terror?
Nothing more than glorified tiddly-winks.
Sorry, I meant erector set.
Huh? You think the fossils were faked?
Photo by W. Kraus of Aachen. By the way, I'm just aachen to get out of the office and go home and drink beer.
They only found the "fossilized" tracks of the buggie...
How do they know what it looked like???
How do tracks get fossilized? Wouldn't that mean that
the tracks had to be covered rapidly, or else they would
have worn away in surely a few rainfalls....
Why is that if an organism "evolves" it is due to the
environment, but if it "dies-off" it is due to the
environment? What makes an organism die in one
environmental change, but "evolve" in the other???
Or is it a case of, "because it's there" explanation, that
has no predictive value?
Looks like something from a Roger Corman movie.
Actually, it looks more like something from Naked Lunch. Like the thing that Dr. Benway got the black powder from.
"And how exactly did Noah get that thing on the Ark?"
He DIDN'T.
(His wife wouldn't let him.)
And that's why there aren't any anymore.
I'd imagine the nastier critters like the mosquitoes, flies and nasty spiders, and rats, were not INVITED onto the ark.
Probably tastes just like chicken. OK, a lot of chicken.
LOL! Thanks! Very nice. That puts me in the mood to watch that episode of MST3K tonight.
They invited THEMSELVES onto the ark ;)
"They invited THEMSELVES onto the ark ;)"
Mosquitos, black flies and spiders...just think of them as Satan's Little Helpers.
Rats, on the other hand, can be good looking.
If you're a condor.
SUV's?
Given that the Bible tells us that man's lifespan was a lot longer (~900 years) prior to the Flood - is it possible that these enormous critters (e.g., cockroaches, milipedes, etc) just grew because they lived a lot longer than they do today (bugs/reptiles, unlike mammals, just keep on growing the older they get)?
Something like this little guy?
"If you see anything that looks like a bug hole....nuke it. Let's move out!"
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