Think Man-Sized Swimming Centipede — And Be Glad It’s A Fossil
A. benmoulae was one of the biggest arthropods that ever lived, and was the largest living animal of its time!
by Christopher Joyce
If living long and prospering is a measure of success, then the arthropods are life’s winners. These are the most common form of life: insects, spiders, crustaceans and centipedes, to name but a few.
And now scientists have their hands on the remains of one of the first ever. It lived 480 million years ago, and it was big and strange.
The fossil was discovered by a Moroccan collector, Ou Said Ben Moula. He gave it several years ago to scientists who spent hundreds of hours scraping away its rocky casing.
"It is one of the very biggest arthropods that ever existed," says Yale paleontologist Peter Van Roy. In fact, he says, it was the biggest animal of any kind on the planet, at the time…
(read more and LISTEN to story: NPR)