Scientists in England are gearing up to publicly display their “fluke of a discovery” next year—the fossilized carapace of a 22-inch-wide, 8-foot-long ancient millipede that was “as big as a car” and weighed approximately 110-pound, as reported over at CNN.
The giant ass bug was what’s known as an Arthropleura, which creepily scuttled around the planet around 326 million years ago, a full 100 million years before dinosaurs showed up.
“This is definitely the biggest bug that ever lived,” confirmed University of Cambridge lecturer, Neil Davies, to CNN via email yesterday—something they probably said proudly, and without a hint of abject disgust or terror.
The discovery of the third known Anthropleura remains came back in 2018, completely by accident, after a large piece of sandstone broke off a cliffside in Northumberland and broke open upon landing on a beach below it.
The fossil slab was so huge that it apparently took four people to haul it in for examination.
Given that Earth formerly featured a much higher level of oxygen in its air, pretty much everything was gigantic during that geologic time period (megaflora and megafauna are the technical terms for “big ass flowers and animals”). The existence of huge insects like Anthropleura have been known for some time, but the date of this particular fossil points to additional reasons for its size other than oxygen levels.
“While we can’t know for sure what they ate, there were plenty of nutritious nuts and seeds available in the leaf litter at the time, and they may even have been predators that fed off other invertebrates and even small vertebrates such as amphibians,” Davies said in a press release, which... ugh.
The 8-feet long millipede now takes the crown for “largest gross bug to have ever lived,” a dubious honor previously bestowed upon a particular species of... brace yourselves... sea scorpions.
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