Dr. Richie Howard

Great to be here.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, I would say so.

They are pretty big.

They are an order of magnitude larger than any other fossil scorpion that we know of.

It's also worth considering that the fossils are incomplete.

It's sort of a jigsaw puzzle of an animal.

And so we have multiple parts of its body, but not the whole thing in one place.

So it's difficult to say exactly how big it was.

That's why it's roughly, we're saying roughly about a meter, roughly three feet long.

Yeah, it did look really different to a modern scorpion.

So in an arachnid, the posterior part of the body is called the epistosoma.

The epistosoma is divided in scorpions specifically into the mesosoma, which is the fat bit, and the metasoma, which is the tail with the sting on the end.

On the mesosoma of the scorpion, we have what's called lateral epimera extending out of the segment.

So these are sort of like wing-shaped bits.

They're very reminiscent, I think, of a horseshoe crab or a trilobite.

Kind of, yeah, yeah.

These are unique among scorpions, so that suggests to us that this was doing something different to other scorpions.

I think the most likely explanation for that is that it was at least partially aquatic.

Yes, this is one of the weirdest elements of the whole study, really.