Pentecopterus Was a Six Foot Long Sea Scorpion

Posted on September 1, 2015

Scientists have discovered fossils of an ancient giant sea scorpion. The scorpion was nearly six feet long in length. It lived 467 million years ago. The creature has been named Pentecopterus after an ancient Greek warship called a penteconter.

The newly identified creature is the oldest known eurypterid, a group of aquatic arthropods that are ancestors of modern spiders, lobsters and tickets. The creature had a large head shield and a narrow body. It had large grasping limbs it could use to trap prey.

James Lamsdell, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University and lead author of the study, says in a statement, "This shows that eurypterids evolved some 10 million years earlier than we thought, and the relationship of the new animal to other eurypterids shows that they must have been very diverse during this early time of their evolution, even though they are very rare in the fossil record."

Yale paleontologist and study co-author Derek Briggs told Reuters, "You would not want one of these in your swimming pool."

The fossil bed containing the Pentecopterus fossils found in a meteorite crater by the Upper Iowa River in northeastern Iowa. The site contained both adult and juvenile specimens. The site was discovered by geologists with the Iowa Geological Survey at the University of Iowa. A research paper on the discovery was published here in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

ANIMALS