British scientists have announced that a quarry in Germany has yielded the fossil of an amazing prehistoric creature called Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae. It is not a dinosaur, however, but possibly the largest bug to ever walk the face of the earth--eight feet long.
This ancient sea scorpion is the ancestor of today's scorpions and possibly all spiders, mites and ticks. Paleontologists speculate that this giant scorpion was capable of growing to enormous size because it did not have any natural enemies, but it was eventually wiped out by the evolution of larger fish. The giant scorpion was also a cannibal, fighting and eating others of its species. The fossil found in Germany was of a kind of scorpion that lived exclusively in that country about 400 million years ago. It is believed that the quarry where the fossil was found was once either an estuary or a swamp.
Although paleontologists have known for quite some time as a result of fossil discoveries that giant millipedes, cockroaches, dragonflies and scorpions once inhabited the earth, they never anticipated that some of them reached the size supported by the find in Germany.
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