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Nearly three-meter centipede discovered in England

The University of Cambridge has just discovered a gigantic centipede. He would have lived there 326 million years ago.

What if England had once been a land of animals straight out of a science fiction movie? Indeed, for several weeks, the paleontological teams of the British island have been making a series of grandiose discoveries. While the country is already rich in a human history that spans several millennia, now researchers are finding traces of a life that we would not even have suspected.

Indeed, a few million years ago, the Earth looked nothing like what it is today. With very different species, a world where everything was much bigger. Long before the dinosaurs, almost 100 million years before their arrival, the world was already populated by strange creatures, XXL dimensions.

A fossil even older than the dinosaurs

Among them, a nearly three-meter-long centipede, the fossil of which was just discovered in a boulder of sandstone near a cliff on the beach at Howick Bay in Northumberland, on the border with the Scotland. Discovered in January 2018, this fossil is believed to be over 326 million years old.

For researchers, this is a major discovery in order to better understand life on Earth, before dinosaurs. This is indeed only the third such specimen discovered in the world, and it is also the largest and oldest that has yet to be found.

With a fossil 75 centimeters long, the scientists deduced that the animal must have measured around 2 meters 70, if not more, for a weight of “only” 50 to 60 kilograms. Thanks to this discovery, scientists at the University of Cambridge, where the fossil was studied, can now say that this ancient centipede lived in forests by the sea, in a tropical climate, which was that of England 326 million years ago.

A land very different from ours

With the continental drift, the British island has moved up the entire northern hemisphere of the planet, but the latter was once at the heart of the Earth, at the level of the equator, offering a hot and humid climate to its inhabitants. According to scientists, the oxygen peak in the atmosphere, which took place at the end of the Carboniferous (300 million years ago) is responsible for this very large size.

The researchers also believe that this giant centipede benefited from a diet very high in protein, which allowed it to gain even more height over the course of its life.

Today the centipedes that we know still live in England, but they never measure more than 20 centimeters, for the largest specimens. On the scale, they only display 2 or 3 grams, far from the 50 kilos of their distant ancestor.

The text of the study can be found here

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