Arthropleura, the biggest bug ever known at up to 3.2m long, inhabited North America and Europe at a time when Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels surged, helping some plants and animals grow to gigantic proportions.
While its fossils have been known since 1854, a large gap has existed in the understanding of the creature because none of the remains had a well-preserved head.
The discovery in France of two Arthropleura fossils with intact heads has now remedied this, providing the anatomical details needed for scientists to classify it as a huge primitive millipede and determine it was not a predator, but rather a plant eater.
The fossils, hich were unearthed in Montceau-les-Mines, are of juvenile individuals that lived in a tropical climate and a swampy environment lush with vegetation.
While Arthropleura was this ecosystem’s behemoth, the fossils preserve young individuals just 4cm long.
The fossils showed Arthropleura’s head was roughly circular, with slender antennae, stalked eyes and mandibles fixed under it. It had two sets of feeding appendages, the first short and round, and the second elongated and leg-like.
The specimens each had 24 body segments and 44 pairs of legs — 88 legs in total. Based on its mouthparts and a body built for slow locomotion, the researchers said that Arthropleura was a detritivore like modern millipedes, feeding on decaying plants, rather than a predator like centipedes.
It could have served the same role in its ecosystem as elephants today or big dinosaurs like the long-necked sauropods in the past — “a big animal spending most of his time eating,” said paleontologist Mickael Lheritier of the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in France, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science Advances.
“I think it is quite a majestic animal. I think its gigantism gives it a peculiar aura, like the aura of whales or elephants,” Lheritier said. “I love to imagine it as the ‘cow’ of the Carboniferous, eating during most of the day — but, of course, a cow with an exoskeleton and many more legs.”
Other examples of ancient arthropod gigantism included Meganeura, an eagle-sized dragonfly, and Pulmonoscorpius, a scorpion more than 1m long.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS