Palaeoecology: A gigantic fossil arthropod trackway
Abstract
A unique, complex trackway has been discovered in Scotland: it was made roughly 330 million years ago by a huge, six-legged water scorpion that was about 1.6 m long and a metre wide. To my knowledge, this is not only the largest terrestrial trackway of a walking arthropod to be found so far, but is also the first record of locomotion on land for a species of Hibbertopterus (Eurypterida). This evidence of lumbering movement indicates that these giant arthropods, now extinct, could survive out of water at a time when the earliest tetrapods were making their transition to the land.
- Publication:
-
Nature
- Pub Date:
- December 2005
- DOI:
- 10.1038/438576a
- Bibcode:
- 2005Natur.438..576W