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  • This is where the Gemini "ask about this page" button on Chrome comes handy.

    It was about 1 meter long (as another commenter pointed out) and lived around 400 million years ago.

    by profsummergig
  • Anyone want to run this paper through an AI to produce some detailed visualizations?
    by voakbasda
  • "lateral epimera on the mesosomal tergites"

    Sideways outerparts on the midbody backparts, I see, I see.

    by card_zero
  • Just the abstract is the stuff of nightmares:

    > Originally described as an isopod in the nineteenth century, and subsequently compared to various arthropod groups, it was re-described with limited illustration as a gigantic scorpion in the 1980s.

    “We reopened Pandora’s box”

    > Illustrating P. gigas with camera lucida drawings, light photography and tomographic data,

    No why would you do this

    > and assign several other specimens from the same formation to this taxon,

    Nooo

    > Several characters supporting a scorpion affinity are present in P. gigas, including large pedipalps with a fixed and movable finger, a stridulatory surface on one of the coxae, and an elongate subtriangular sternum morphology … Uniquely among scorpions, P. gigas has lateral epimera on the mesosomal tergites,

    I don’t know what any of that means but it all sounds absolutely horrible

    > and combined with the fluvial environment in which the fossils are preserved, we suggest that P. gigas may have been aquatic or amphibious.

    OH GOD IT’S UNDER THE WATER

    I WILL NEVER GO WILD SWIMMING AGAIN

    And in the article the cherry on the cake: it was OR IS from Herefordshire. Where I will shortly be moving.

    by dash2
  • I'll admit all I really wanted to know what how big this darn this was and I couldn't find it in the paper. I looked it up and it is about three feet/one meter.
    by bradly

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