Big Scorpion Or Big Fraud?
By Mark Steer
There was a great hoo-hah last week as a group of European scientists declared that they'd discovered the fossil of an enormous prehistoric scorpion. The beast, which lived about 390 million years ago, would have paddled around rivers and swamps on the lookout for tasty morsels desperate to be torn limb from limb by its monster claws. Named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, it was a truly terrifying beast.)) |
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There is, however, one problem. The fossil hunters didn't find the entire body of this monster. They didn't even find most of it. In fact they only found a single claw. How on earth did our plucky palaeontologists get from a single claw to a ruddy great sea scorpion? Nowhere does it say. Maybe the beast is less Jaekelopterus and more Jokelopterus.
So, having smelled an outsized prehistoric rat we put our heads together and tried to think what else the creature in question could be.
Add to the gallery by sending your pictures to contributions [at] null-hypothesis.co.uk.
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Click on the images to enlarge
More on ancient life from the Null:
- Big mouth - Marsupial lion's fearsome bite
- Big head - Fossil lizard had two heads
- Big lie - Dinosaurs found alive and well
- Big joke - Largest ever fossils discovered
Image: Gergely Óhegyi
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