About an hour ago, at about ten PM, my daughter and I were coming back from faxing a job application for my wife when my daughter suddenly shrieked and ran behind me. I said “What’s wrong?” and she said “LOOK AT THAT HUGE BUG!”
I looked where she was pointing and … whoa. Big ol’ bug. I had her run inside and get a bowl with a screw-on lid and managed to capture it, thinking it might be a big spider or scorpion, but it doesn’t really look like either. It has 8 legs, like a spider or scorpion, but it doesn’t look like a spider to me, and it has no stinging tail and no pinching claws, just a pudgy abdomen and long front legs. I thought “Could this be one of those vinegaroon / whip scorpion things I’ve heard about?” but there isn’t even a whip-like tail.
I got a couple of blurry photos; sadly, they’re the best I can figure out how to do with this camera:
The CompactFlash card I put under him gives an idea of the scale. The head looks big, but it’s actually pretty small; the two cone-shaped projections you see at the front of the head are actually two big ol’ serrated jaws, and there are two more underneath so he has a giant (well, for a bug … maybe 7.5mm long?) chomping mouth that looks like it would pinch like hell if he bit your finger. You can see the (blurry) remains of a beetle I put in with him; he attacked it, positioned it between his huge jaws, and crunched through its exoskeleton with no problem, then proceeded to guzzle down the body. Horrifying. I’ve never seen a bug with visible “teeth” before.
So what kind of hideous mutant demon critter is this?
By the way, as you can see from my location field, we live in southern Nevada, in case that helps with the identification. (It helped us determine that it probably wasn’t a weta, for instance, like my daughter thought it might be, since they tend to live more in New Zealand and less in anywhere else. Heh heh …)
I wondered if that might be it – it reminded me of those trick-of-perspective pictures that were on Snopes a couple years back, showing similar-looking critters caught by soldiers in Iraq that appeared to be as big as a dinner plate and captioned with all that phony information about how they like to burrow into camels’ stomachs and devour them from within. But I didn’t realize they lived here as well! I’ll never be able to leave the house again!
Oh, and many thanks, Johnny L.A. and Maastricht. I couldn’t even remember what the Snopes creatures were called to search for them, so I really appreciate you guys posting the answer. And you even both included links to Wikipedia! That’s good old-fashioned high-quality GQ courtesy there.
Holy mother of god I’m not going to get any sleep tonight after looking at that picture. Looks like something that was specially made for an Indiana Jones movie.
I posted the same question once. Said solpugid was found in my house. I’ve also found two house centipedes and one large green regular centipede. The centipedes are much more harmful but the solpugid still creeped me out more. Ah! the joys of living in the desert.
I had a late-night encounter with a Jerusalem Cricket last week at a campground bathroom. My first reaction was to shoo it away from the doorway. I know that someone else would have stomped on it and bragged about killing the “ugly” thing.
