What Does He Eat? Anything He Wants To!

How cool is an eight-foot long sea scorpion? The Los Angeles Times reported this morning on a fossilized claw that British researchers say belonged to one.

"We knew the sea scorpions were among the largest creepy-crawlies ever, but we didn't realize just how big they could get," said paleontologist Simon J. Braddy of the University of Bristol, the primary author of the report in the journal Biology Letters. The fossil was found in a quarry near Prum, Germany.

Sea scorpions became extinct about 250 million years ago, but they were precursors of modern land-based scorpions. Smaller varieties are common in the fossil record, and evidence suggests that they ventured forth onto land for at least brief forays.

But "there is no way this thing could have crawled out onto land," Braddy said.

"This is simply too spindly. Its legs would break under its own weight."

Reminds me of the Dan Brown book Deception Point where he discusses how the tasty things from the sea that we like to eat so much (shrimp, lobster) are really just very large bugs, too large in fact to live out of the buoyancy of the sea water.