Guest “When Sci-Fi predicted paleontology” by David Middleton

Anyone else out there remember this classically awful 1957 science fiction movie?

It scared the bejesus out of me when I was it in the late 1960’s when I was 9 or 10 years old.

Well guess what?

Largest ever millipede’s head revealed by 300-million-year-old fossils

By James Ashworth

First published 9 October 2024

Well-preserved fossils uncovered in France have revealed new insights into one of the biggest invertebrates to ever walk on Earth.

Arthropleura was a millipede-like animal which lived more than 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period, with some individuals reaching more than two metres long.

The head of one of history’s biggest arthropods has been revealed in detail for the first time.

Arthropleura is an arthropod, the group containing insects, crustaceans, arachnids and their relatives. For many years, only fossils of its body survived, which saw it placed among the earliest millipedes. Now, the discovery of the first complete head has revealed a surprising twist.

While the new fossils are not from fully grown Arthropleura, some of which reached 2.6 metres long, they reveal important characteristics. Most notably, the head has some features of early centipedes, suggesting millipedes and centipedes might be more closely related than previously accepted.

[…]

Natural History Museum

While Arthropleura wasn’t a mollusk, the first thing I thought of when I read the article was The Monster That Challenged the World.

INTRODUCTION

The iconic myriapod Arthropleura is a Carboniferous-Permian arthropod renowned for its record-breaking gigantism (1), inhabiting forest environments near the equatorial belt (2) from ~346 million to 290 million years ago (Ma) (Visean to Sakmarian) (1)

[…]

Lhéritier et al., 2024

Don’t you love it when science imitates science fiction? (Sarcasm purely intentional). Of course, Arthropleura lived when Earth’s atmospheric oxygen concentration was at its highest level of the Phanerozoic Eon, enabling insects, arthropods, crustaceans and other creepy-crawlers to grow to 1950’s Sic-Fi sizes…

While The Monster That Challenged the World was just one of many giant “bugs” that only lived in classically bad 1950’s Sci-Fi movies.

References

Berner, Robert A.  Atmospheric oxygen over Phanerozoic time.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 1999, 96 (20) 10955-10957; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.96.20.10955

Lhéritier, Mickaël  et al., Head anatomy and phylogenomics show the Carboniferous giant Arthropleura belonged to a millipede-centipede group. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp6362(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp6362

Pillola, Gian & Zoboli, Daniel. (2021). First occurrence of Arthropleura armata (Myriapoda) in the Moscovian (Carboniferous) of SW Sardinia (Italy). Bollettino della Societa Paleontologica Italiana. 60. 49-54. 10.4435/BSPI.2021.01.