L’Arthropleura lived on Earth several hundred million years ago and could weigh up to 50 kilos.
Scientists have managed to reconstruct the head of an extinct giant insect. This creature, from the family of Arthropleuracould measure up to 2.6 meters long, weigh more than 50 kilos and be made up of dozens of legs. Thanks to the study of complete and well-preserved juvenile fossils, researchers have succeeded in modeling a real passport photo of this centipede that lived on Earth several hundred million years ago.
This work, in which French scientists from Claude Bernard Lyon-1 University in Villeurbanne participated, was published in the journal Sciences Advances. They show that the giant insect’s head was a round bulb with two short, bell-shaped antennae, two protruding eyes like those of a crab, and a rather small mouth suited to crushing leaves and bark. . These arthropods – the group that includes crabs, spiders and insects – had characteristics of today’s centipedes and millipedes. But some of them were much bigger.
One of the largest centipedes on Earth
The largest Arthropleura may have been the largest centipedes to ever live on Earth. A debate not yet settled since a giant sea scorpion, also extinct, could have competed with it. Anyway, since the end of the 19e century, researchers in Europe and North America collected fragments and imprints of these enormous insects. “We wanted to see what the head of this animal looked like for a very long time”James Lamsdell, a paleobiologist at West Virginia University, who was not involved in the study, told the Associated Press.
To produce a model of the head, the researchers first used CT scans to study fully intact young fossil specimens embedded in rocks found in a coal mine in France in the 1980s. This technique allowed researchers to examine “hidden details, such as pieces of the head still embedded in the rock”without damaging the fossil, according to James Lamsdell. “When digging into rock, you don’t know what part of a delicate fossil may have been lost or damaged”he added.
The juvenile fossil specimens measured only about 6 centimeters and it is possible that they wereArthropleura which would not have reached a maximum size. But researchers believe they are close enough to the largest specimens to provide a glimpse of what adults – whether giant or smaller – looked like when they lived 300 million years ago .
