Guest “When Sci-Fi Predicted Paleontology” by David Middleton
Does anyone else remember this classically terrible 1957 sci-fi film?
The monster that challenged the world
It scared the crap out of me when I was 9 or 10 years old in the late 1960s.
Now guess what?
Largest centipede head ever discovered in 300-million-year-old fossils
By James Ashworth
First published on October 9, 2024
Well-preserved fossils discovered in France have provided new insight into one of the largest invertebrates to ever live on Earth.
Arthropleura was a millipede-like animal that lived more than 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous Period, with some individuals reaching more than two meters in length.
The head of one of the largest arthropods in history has been revealed in detail for the first time.
Arthropleura is an arthropod, the group includes insects, crustaceans, arachnids and their relatives. For many years only fossils of its body remained, making it one of the earliest millipedes. Now the discovery of the first complete head has revealed a surprising twist.
Although the new fossils do not come from adult Arthropleura, some of which reached 2.6 meters in length, they do show important features. Notably, the head exhibits some features of early millipedes, suggesting that millipedes and centipedes may be more closely related than previously thought.
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Natural History Museum
Although Arthropleura was not a mollusc, the first thing I thought of when reading the article was “The Monster That Challenged the World.”
INTRODUCTION
The iconic Myriapod Arthropleura is a Carboniferous-Permian arthropod known for its record-breaking gigantism (1) and lived from approximately 346 to 290 million years (Ma) (Visean to Sakmarian) in forest environments near the equatorial belt (2) lived)
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Lheritier et al., 2024
Figure 1. “(Color online) Impressive comparative size of Arthropleura armata, the up to 2.5 m long land millipede-like arthropod (modified from Schneider & Werneburg, 2010); The scale bar is 1 m.” Pillola and Zoboli 2021 Figure 2. Good thing the fat Arthropleura was a detritivore.
Don't you love it when science imitates science fiction? (Sarcasm purely intentional). Of course, Arthropleura lived when Earth's atmospheric oxygen concentration peaked in the Phanerozoic, allowing insects, arthropods, crustaceans, and other creepy-crawlies to grow to 1950s sic-fi sizes…
Figure 3. Oxygen content in the Phanerozoic, modeled from carbon and sulfur cycles (modified from Berner, 1999).
While “The Monster That Challenged the World” was just one of many giant “bugs” that only lived in classically bad 1950s science fiction films.
References
Berner, Robert A. Atmospheric oxygen in the Phanerozoic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 1999, 96 (20) 10955-10957; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.96.20.10955
Lhéritier, Mickaël et al., Head anatomy and phylogenomics show that the Carboniferous giant Arthropleura belonged to a millipede-millipede group. Science. Adv. 10eadp6362(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp6362
Pillola, Gian & Zoboli, Daniel. (2021). First occurrence of Arthropleura armata (Myriapoda) in the Moscow (Carboniferous) southwest of Sardinia (Italy). Bulletin of the Italian Paleontological Society. 60. 49-54. 10.4435/BSPI.2021.01.
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