Scientists have now produced a mug shot after studying fossils of juveniles that were complete and very well preserved.
Arthropleura, which roamed the Earth 300 million years ago, are the ancestors of centipedes and millipedes. Arthropleura belongs to the arthropod group. This includes insects, crustaceans – such as crabs – as well as spiders, scorpions and similar creatures.
Its size was supported by the high oxygen levels of the time, allowing arthropods to grow to extraordinary proportions. Arthropleura dominated the forest floor, feeding on plant material and playing a key role in its ecosystem.
This discovery was made possible by studying intact juvenile fossils found in a French coal field in the 1980s. Scientists used CT scans to examine these fossils without damaging them. The fossils showed Arthropleura’s head was roughly circular, with slender antennae, stalked eyes and mandibles – jaws – fixed under it. Arthropleura had two sets of feeding appendages, the first short and round, and the second elongated and leg-like.
The specimens each had 24 body segments and 44 pairs of legs – 88 legs in total. Based on its mouthparts and a body built for slow locomotion, the researchers concluded Arthropleura was a detritivore like modern millipedes, feeding on decaying plants, rather than a predator like centipedes, according to a report in Reuters.”We discovered that it had the body of a millipede, but head of a centipede,” said Mickael Lheritier, a study co-author and paleobiologist at the University Claude Bernard Lyon in France. James Lamsdell, a paleobiologist at West Virginia University who was not involved in the study, expressed excitement about the findings. “We have been wanting to see what the head of this animal looked like for a really long time,” he said.Researchers have been collecting fragments and footprints of these massive bugs since the late 1800s. Scientists have been studying Arthropleura fossils since the first one was discovered in 1854, but the fossils have been incomplete.
(With agency inputs)