Before Humans, England Belonged to Horrifying Scorpions the Size of Dogs. Here’s What They Looked Like.
If you’ve ever found yourself playing Fallout: New Vegas and thanking your lucky stars that you don’t live in a world infested with gigantic scorpions, well, I hate to break it to you, but you do. Or at least, you used to. According to new research published in the journal Palaeontology and led by Richard Howard of the Natural History Museum, scientists have confirmed that a massive scorpion once crept across what is now England and Wales. Praearcturus gigas, as it’s called, lived around 415 million years ago during the Early Devonian period. Fossil fragments pulled from the St Maughan’s Sandstone Formation show a predator with 16-centimeter pincers and an estimated body length of nearly one meter, or roughly three feet. A scorpion as long as a toddler is tall. This would make it the largest scorpion ever identified in the fossil record . Photo: Franz Anthony/Natural History Museum No Way That Massive Thing Is a Scorpion, Scientists Thought The fossils themselves hav...