© Andrew WendruffThe fossil (left) was unearthed in Wisconsin in 1985. Scientists analyzed it and discovered the ancient animal's respiratory and circulatory organs (center) were near-identical to those of a modern-day scorpion (right).
Columbus, Ohio —
Scientists studying fossils collected 35 years ago have identified them as the oldest-known scorpion species, a prehistoric animal from about 437 million years ago. The researchers found that the animal likely had the capacity to breathe in both ancient oceans and on land.The discovery provides new information about how animals transitioned from living in the sea to living entirely on land: The scorpion's respiratory and circulatory systems are almost identical to those of our modern-day scorpions — which spend their lives exclusively on land — and operate similarly to those of a horseshoe crab, which lives mostly in the water, but which is capable of forays onto land for short periods of time.
The researchers named the new scorpion
Parioscorpio venator. The genus name means "progenitor scorpion," and the species name means "hunter." They outlined their findings in a study published today in the journal
Scientific Reports.
"We're looking at the oldest known scorpion — the oldest known member of the arachnid lineage, which has been one of the most successful land-going creatures in all of Earth history," said
Loren Babcock, an author of the study and a professor of
earth sciences at The Ohio State University.
"And beyond that, what is of even greater significance is that we've identified a mechanism by which animals made that critical transition from a marine habitat to a terrestrial habitat. It provides a model for other kinds of animals that have made that transition including, potentially, vertebrate animals. It's a groundbreaking discovery."
The "hunter scorpion" fossils were unearthed in 1985 from a site in Wisconsin that was once a small pool at the base of an island cliff face. They had remained unstudied in a museum at the University of Wisconsin for more than 30 years when one of Babcock's doctoral students, Andrew Wendruff — now an adjunct professor at Otterbein University in Westerville — decided to examine the fossils in detail.
Comment: Another sign of Earth's environmental imbalance? A symbol of the elites' rapaciousness? Out-breaks seem to be increasing in the last five years