The largest arthropod to ever live finally has a head
Fossils of an extinct giant millipede reveal new details about the arthropod’s anatomy.
Scientists have been taking a look out Arthropleura’s fossilized head for over a hundred years
This three-D reconstruction of a fossilized juvenile Arthropleura reveals details of the millipede’s head (green), equivalent to its mouthparts and antennae.
Lhéritier et al/Science Advances 2024
Two newly discovered fossils are helping scientists wrap their heads across the anatomy of the foremost important arthropod of all time — a millipede that grew longer than a king-sized bed and lived between 346 million and 290 million years ago.
Arthropleura turn out to be discovered in 1854, but no one had ever managed to in finding a fossil that included a head. “It turn out to be more than a hundred years since we start in search of a head. And now we finally have one,” says Mickaël Lhéritier, a paleontologist at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in France.
Micro CT scans of the fossils, unearthed from present-day France, reveal never-earlier than-seen details in regards to the big millipede’s anatomy, including its antennae, eyes, mandibles and other feeding appendages, Lhéritier and colleagues report October 9 in Science Advances.
Until now, scientists had assumed that Arthropleura would have had a head more like its fresh millipede relatives (SN: 12/21/21). On the choice hand, the fossils reveal a more intermediate state within the lineage’s evolution, Lhéritier says.
“Arthropleura has the body of a millipede, like as an example, with two pairs of legs per [body] segment, but also the pinnacle of a centipede,” he says, noting that the mouthparts are specifically centipedelike. Still, anatomical observations moreover to phylogenomic data places Arthropleura squarely within the millipede camp, Lhéritier’s team contends.
Though the specimens provide a wealth of knowledge about Arthropleura, there’s a lot left to in testing about this mighty millipede, including what it would have eaten and whether it walked on land, underwater or turn out to be ready to both. As an instance, the new fossils also reveal that Arthropleura had stalklike eyes, just like a crab, says Lhéritier, and that alone suggests that the creature will have had a technique of life that involved water.
In the head, scientists still don’t know whether both sexes grew to enormous sizes, or how long it took juveniles to grow into the total largesse that made Arthropleura an international-record holder.
Who knows what the following new finding would per chance reveal?
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