If you hate the bugs you find today than you’ll be glad that they are small compared to what they used to be hundreds of years ago. Germans uncovered a fossil claw that they believe belonged to what they think is the biggest bug that has ever been discovered.
This sea scorpion – Jaekelopterus rhenaniae – is as big as a large crocodile and seemed to be the worst predator in its day. They believe that it fed on fish and even killed its own kind. The find shows that arthropods—animals such as insects, spiders, and crabs, which have hard external skeletons, jointed limbs, and segmented bodies—once grew much larger than previously thought, said paleobiologist Simon Braddy of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
“This is an amazing discovery,” Braddy said. “We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, supersized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies,” he added. “But we never realized, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.”
Smaller sea scorpions are known to have crawled ashore to mate or shed their outer skins. But “there’s no way this monster bug would have been able to do that, because it was just too big,” Braddy said. “Its legs were relatively flimsy compared to the size of its body,” he added. Without water buoying the big insect up, its legs would have collapsed under the weight of its body, Braddy said.
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