Giant Bugs!

[Tuckerfan]

Unfortunately I can’t find an online cite for what these are and who made 'em, but it’s a fullsize model of giant centipede based on fossils recently discovered. But you can see screen caps of it here, here, here, and here. Good thing they’re extinct! (Feel free to forward those things on to people you want give nightmares to.

[GIGObuster]

Plugging “giant centipede” into Google news:

Ah, here we go:

http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/nw_science/article/0,2668,ALBQ_21236_3699656,00.html

Spectacular specimen
This bug’s a big one - 8 feet long - and New Mexico scientists nabbed some of its fossils

By Sue Vorenberg
Tribune Reporter
April 14, 2005

Think mosquitoes and millipedes are nasty?

Then don’t look too deeply into New Mexico’s past.

Today, you can squish the tiny bugs, but 300 million years ago, 8-foot-long millipedes were in control of the landscape, and humans weren’t even a gleam in evolution’s eye.

New Mexico is now a world record holder of such “exquisitely grotesque creatures,” as one worker at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science calls them. Evidence of the largest arthropleura - its technical name - ever found was recovered by the museum on Friday.

“In today’s world, you couldn’t have a bug this big,” said Spencer Lucas, paleontology curator at the museum. “This is basically the Tyrannosaurus of the Pennsylvanian period, millions of years before dinosaurs evolved. If you took a time machine back, you’d definitely want to check your sleeping bag for these suckers before getting in.”

The Pennsylvanian time period lasted from 325 to 280 million years ago.

The museum has not found the bug itself. What it did find in a remote canyon near Española were the fossilized tracks of such a creature - which looks like a 3-by-8 speed bump with flat wings holding hundreds of nasty, ribbed, horseshoe-shaped feet.

“This is a very spectacular thing,” said Adrian Hunt, director of the museum, who went out in the field with the team to recover it. “Think of it as a much bigger cross between a millipede and a centipede. It probably lived in swampy forest debris. Something like this has never been found before in the Western United States.”

[Tuckerfan]

You know, I tried that and got squat.

[GIGObuster]

You can bet Hollywood will soon announce a new horror movie:

ONE HUNDRED-LEGGED FREAKS!!!

[zagloba]

Rats. I’d hoped this was about the introduction of triple-sized VWs!

[Ale]

I´ve had cockroaches about that size on my kitchen…

[Lissla_Lissar]

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate centipedes?

[Darwin_s_Finch]

@Tuckerfan

Unfortunately I can’t find an online cite for what these are and who made 'em, but it’s a fullsize model of giant centipede based on fossils recently discovered.

To be specific, what was discovered were ichnofossils (aka “trace fossils” - evidence of a creature, but not remains of the creature itself. In this case, the ichnofossils were trackways). The abstract for the paper in which these trackways were described is online here. From the trackways, the size of the critter was inferred. Note that the trackway has been given the name Diplichnites cuithensis (the “-ichnites” part of the generic name indicates that it is the name of an ichnofossil), while the creature that made the trackway is Arthropleura.

This find is important because, as mentioned in the article linked to by GIGObuster, these critters had not previously been known in the U.S.

Although I really wish the association with Tyrannosaurus would be dropped; it’s a dumb analogy. For one thing, it is unknown whether this thing ate plants or was a predator. For another, Tyrannosaurus wasn’t the largest predatory dinosaur ever, and possibly not even the largest of its time.