Arthropleura, the biggest bug ever known at up to 3.2m long, inhabited North America and Europe at a time when Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels surged, helping some plants and animals grow to gigantic proportions.
While its fossils have been known since 1854, a large gap has existed in the understanding of the creature because none of the remains had a well-preserved head.
The discovery in France of two Arthropleura fossils with intact heads has now remedied this, providing the anatomical details needed for scientists to classify it as a huge primitive millipede and determine it was not a predator, but rather a plant eater.
The fossils, hich were unearthed in Montceau-les-Mines, are of juvenile individuals that lived in a tropical climate and a swampy environment lush with vegetation.
While Arthropleura was this ecosystem’s behemoth, the fossils preserve young individuals just 4cm long.
The fossils showed Arthropleura’s head was roughly circular, with slender antennae, stalked eyes and mandibles fixed under it. It had two sets of feeding appendages, the first short and round, and the second elongated and leg-like.
The specimens each had 24 body segments and 44 pairs of legs — 88 legs in total. Based on its mouthparts and a body built for slow locomotion, the researchers said that Arthropleura was a detritivore like modern millipedes, feeding on decaying plants, rather than a predator like centipedes.
It could have served the same role in its ecosystem as elephants today or big dinosaurs like the long-necked sauropods in the past — “a big animal spending most of his time eating,” said paleontologist Mickael Lheritier of the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in France, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science Advances.
“I think it is quite a majestic animal. I think its gigantism gives it a peculiar aura, like the aura of whales or elephants,” Lheritier said. “I love to imagine it as the ‘cow’ of the Carboniferous, eating during most of the day — but, of course, a cow with an exoskeleton and many more legs.”
Other examples of ancient arthropod gigantism included Meganeura, an eagle-sized dragonfly, and Pulmonoscorpius, a scorpion more than 1m long.
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