Hibbertopterus
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Extinct (fossil)
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Hibbertopterus is a genus of giant sea scorpions (class Eurypterida) extinct 250 million years ago, thought to have inhabited the swamps of Scotland.
Hibbertopterus is believed to have been one of the first water animals to exhibit terrestrial locomotion, as tracks indicating a dragging movement have been found in West Lothian, Scotland [1]. The track found was roughly six metres long and a metre wide, suggesting the size of the scorpion to be six feet in length.
The specimen itself is the base of overlying and infilling sandstone and thus shows the tracks in negative relief: a groove appears as a ridge.
Writing in Nature, palaeontologist Martin A. Whyte of the University of Sheffield presents evidence that the animal that made the tracks was about 1.6 m long and 1 m wide, thus comparable in size with the largest known Hibbertopteroid body fossils.
The trackway itself is in a non-marine sequence. It is 6m long, about a meter wide and consists of "sinuous, paired belts of appendage prints flanking a sub-central groove". Whyte showed that the animal making the tracks was moving extremely slowly.
[edit] Reference
- ^ Whyte, M A. "Palaeoecology: A gigantic fossil arthropod trackway". Nature 438: 576.
