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The largest-ever fossil of a giant millipede—as big as a car—has been found on a beach in the north of England. The fossil—the remains of a creature called Arthropleura—dates from the Carboniferous Period, about 326 million years ago, over 100 million years before the Age of Dinosaurs. The fossil reveals that Arthropleura was the largest-known invertebrate animal of all time, larger than the ancient sea scorpions that were the previous record holders. The specimen, found on a Northumberland beach about 40 miles north of Newcastle, is made up of multiple articulated exoskeleton segments, broadly similar in form to modern millipedes....

Ironically, Charles Darwin set great store by his study of earthworms, which effectively mix and make most of the soil on Earth, but his successors in evolutionary science have tended to neglect the creatures that live beneath their feet. Instead, Professor Blaxter said, they regard the soil as a kind of test bed - or “black box” - that there is no need to understand. He added that this project would help to redress that issue. “Until the soil collapses, and the ecosystems dies completely, we don't know what's going on. We have to start to get inside the ‘black...

Christopher Doughty, faculty member in the School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University... "Theory suggests that large animals are disproportionately important to the spread of fertility across the planet... What better way to test this than to compare fertility in the world during the Cretaceous period -- where sauropods, the largest herbivores to exist, roamed freely -- to the Carboniferous period -- a time in Earth's history before four-legged erbivores evolved." During these two periods, plants were buried faster than they could decompose. As a result, coal was formed. Doughty gathered coal samples from mines throughout...