© Neil Davies/PAPA MediaA section of Arthropleura's exoskeleton was found by a 'fluke' on Howick beach by a Cambridge University scientist.
Giant millipedes as long as a car and weighing 50kg once hunted across northern England, experts have revealed, following the discovery of a 326m-year-old fossil.
The largest fossil of a giant millipede was found by a "fluke" on a Northumberland beach at Howick, after a section of cliff fell on to the shore.
In order to get so big, the creature, known as Arthropleura, must have found a nutrient-rich plant diet and may even have been a predator, feasting on other invertebrates or small amphibians.
© J W Schneider/TU Bergakademie Freiberg/PAIllustration issued by Cambridge University of what Arthropleura looked like
Experts believe the fossil represents a section of the creature's exoskeleton that it shed near a riverbed, which was preserved by sand.
The segment is about 75cm long, leading scientists to believe its entire body could have measured about 2.7 metres long and weighed 50kg.
The remains of the creature date from the Carboniferous period, more than 100m years before the age of dinosaurs. At the time, Great Britain lay near the equator and enjoyed warm temperatures.
A former PhD student who was walking along the coast in January 2018 spotted it in a large block of sandstone that had fallen from the cliff.
Dr Neil Davies, from Cambridge University's department of earth sciences and the lead author of a paper on the fossil, said: "It was a complete fluke of a discovery. The way the boulder had fallen, it had cracked open and perfectly exposed the fossil, which one of our former PhD students happened to spot when walking by."
The fossil was removed with permission of Natural England and the landowners, the Howick Estate, and was taken to Cambridge for analysis.
It was so big it required four people to carry it.
Davies said: "While we can't know for sure what they ate, there were plenty of nutritious nuts and seeds available in the leaf litter at the time, and they may even have been predators that fed off other invertebrates and even small vertebrates such as amphibians."
The creatures crawled around the equatorial region for about 45m years, before going extinct, possibly due to global warming that made the climate too dry for them, or due to the rise of reptiles, who outcompeted them for food.
The fossil will go on public display at Cambridge's Sedgwick Museum in the new year.
The results are reported in the Journal of the Geological Society.
Reader Comments
I'm on a mission to make it know
R.C.
RC
RC
I think there are a lot of things that aren't actually 'native' to earth. The cheetah : Contains dog and cat genetics. Susceptible to diseases that only effect dogs, and only effect cats.
And giants is a topic of interest for me too. A giraffe cannot grow over 14 feet due to 'gravity', Its heart cannot pump blood over that height. I'm in the expando-earth camp. On a smaller planet, gravity would not be as strong and thus the life could/would grow bigger. Funny tho, the expanding earth model was postulated by the same guy who gave us the 'Pangea' model. But mainstream academia closed its eyes to the expando earth model.
Mainstream academia....pffft. For almost a century, they presented dinosaurs walking upright, dragging their tails - when it was known from the beginning the used their tails as a balance/rudder.
They deliberately presented them that way due to 'space constrictions' in the museums. And the sheep nod and bleet.
Our main offenders are originally from Africa and are called "American" smh Cockroaches' - big boys. If anyone down here claims they've never seen one in their house? They're lying.
RC