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Chapter 1: What ancient scorpion discovery was made in England and Wales?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. If you have arachnophobia, consider this your opportunity to try exposure therapy because scorpions ahead. A new study suggests that 415 million years ago in modern day England and Wales, a scorpion the length of a golden retriever was scurrying around, complete with six-inch pincers.
Some of these specimens were discovered long ago, and paleontologists had categorized them as sea-dwelling crustaceans. But a fresh look at these old fossils suggests they're not an ancient lobster at all. Dr. Richie Howard is the curator of fossil arthropods at the Natural History Museum in London, England, and the lead author on this gigantoscorpion study. Richie, welcome to Science Friday.
Great to be here. Thank you very much.
I've seen these specimens described as chonky. Does that sound right to you?
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.
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Chapter 2: How do the characteristics of the giant scorpion differ from modern ones?
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.
Wow. Okay. You know, from the pieces you have, does it seem like it looked like just an inflated version of a modern scorpion or is the morphology different?
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.
Should I picture like those lobster bits on the tail?
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.
Were these scorpions, I mean, can we extrapolate what they were, their role in the ecosystem? Were they like the grizzly bears of their time?
Yes, this is one of the weirdest elements of the whole study, really. So the early Devonian period, when Priarchurus lived, is a strikingly alien landscape. So I think people are vaguely aware that there were giant arthropods in Earth's deep paleontological past.
Like the two-foot dragonfly and the eight-foot-long millipede, right?
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Chapter 3: What role did the giant scorpions play in their ancient ecosystem?
So like 100 years ago, we knew about something like 200 scorpions on Earth. And now we know about over 2,500.
Wow.
What about their venom? Okay. I mean, let's get to the brass tacks, which is scorpion venom, right? That's the thing that we're scared of. We're scared of scorpions stinging us because that's like the legends that we hear. Like you're going to die instantly if a scorpion stings you. And I'm not going to say that that's not true entirely, like universally, right? That that's untrue.
Because there are places in the world where there are genuinely dangerous scorpions. But often the thing that makes them more dangerous is people's access to medical care. So nowadays we have really effective... antivenoms that can counteract the effects of scorpion venom very well. And so if you can reach a hospital and get antivenom, you'll be able to survive a scorpion sting.
So the vast majority of scorpions pose no danger whatsoever to humans. Of the 2,500 scorpions on Earth, there's only about 50 or less that are dangerous to humans. Like 99% of scorpions don't pose any harm to humans. But that is that's helpful. Go ahead. Go on. The 1% are really interesting, not because they could kill you, which it's not actually the scorpion venom itself that can kill you.
It's the effects of your body responding to this like trick that the venom plays on your brain. And so venom is a cocktail. And one of the things in this cocktail is a neurotransmitter inhibitor. And so what it does is it goes in and it interferes with the way that your cells signal each other, your nerve cells.
And so it tells your brain that your hand is like experiencing some severe trauma when all that's actually happened is you got a prick in your finger, like nothing else is going on other than the scorpion venom tricking your brain to think that you're like being smashed with a sledgehammer. And what happens is that your brain turns on this immune response that raises your blood pressure.
And that really rapid increase in blood pressure can have downstream consequences like a heart attack. And the heart attack is ultimately what kills you. So it's not technically the scorpion, it's you. It's me killing me, as always.
Okay, let's get to my favorite category, mating and dating.
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