#millipede

#millipede

Millipede Nearly Nine Feet Long DiscoveredEarth scientist Neil Davies and a group of his PhD students stumbled upon a fossil revealed by a cracked boulder in 2018 in Northumberland, UK. A thorough study of the fossil reveals it to be that of a millipede, or rather, one segment of a millipede, and the fossil was three feet long! The millipede of the Arthropleura genus lived between 295 and 345 million years ago. At that time, what is now England was much closer to the equator. The animal that once inhabited the fossil, which is believed to have been a carapace that was shed during its lifetime, was 2.7 meters (8.85 feet) long and weighed about 50 kilograms (110 pounds). This fossil is not the only giant millipede found in England, but now it's the largest. In fact, it sets a new record for the largest arthropod ever found. The discovery throws a wrench in one theory about why huge animals developed. It was previously thought that giant-sized creatures were the result of an abundance of oxygen, yet this species of millipede reached its huge size long before the rise in oxygen levels. Read more about this discovery at NPR. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: Neil Davies/Sarah Collins) #fossil #millipede #giant

First Millipede With More Than 1,000 Legs FoundWhat do you call a millipede with more than a thousand legs? Hmm, a billipede?No, you call it Eumillipes persephone, because this isn't a joke. Until now, the millipede with the most legs had 750 legs. E. persephone has 1306 legs! This millipede was found 60 feet underground in Western Australia while a crew was digging a bore hole for mining purposes. The tiny creature is only about a millimeter wide, but to accommodate all those legs, its about ten centimeters long! While it has plenty of legs, E. persephone has no eyes. It doesn't need them, living underground. The millipede survives by eating fungus. Yeah, finding and publishing a new species is pretty exciting, but you have to wonder who exactly got the task of counting all those legs. I bet it was a grad student. Now, you may wonder why a millipede would even be called that if it has less than a thousand legs. Wouldn't you call such an creature a centipede? And there is a centipede with 382 legs- why isn't that called a millipede? The names have less to do with the number of legs and more to do with what kind of animal it is. Centipedes and millipedes are anatomically different. Read about Eumillipes persephone and its 1306 legs, and how to tell the difference between a centipede and a millipede at Real Clear Science. (Image credit: Paul E. Marak et al/Scientific Reports) #millipede #legs #centipede