#51936: — 12/04  at  01:26 PM
Ye cats! That's like something out of Dr Who.

I shall be hiding behind the sofa for the rest of this thread.

#51940: — 12/04  at  01:53 PM
Very, very large pots. But it wouldn't be fair, wasn't it a nice plankton filterer with a similar niche as whale sharks and baleen whales? I guess my thoughts go to spears and guns. (And I have never hunted nor have the inclination to. Must be some ancient corner of my mind that sits up and take notice.)

BTW, is PZ insinuating that his sister is wider than about a meter?

#51941: Alon Levy — 12/04  at  01:56 PM
Maybe it's just me, but when I see an arthropod that large, I also think about very large pots and tureens of melted butter.

When I see an arthropod that large, I'm just glad that we don't live in the Permian and large arthropods are extinct.

#51943: — 12/04  at  02:08 PM
I'm lucky enough to live in Kingston,Ontario, Canada, where there are some of the oldest, if not the oldest, terrestrial trackways in the world nearby. The trackways here look remarkably similar to the photo above, although they are much smaller in scale.

see: McNaughton et al. 2002. First steps on land: Arthropod trackways in Cambrian-Ordovician eolian sandstone, southeastern Ontario, Canada. Geology. Vol. 30, No. 5, pp. 391–394.

(I'm not one of authours of the above paper, but my supervisor is).

In the Kingston area, these critters hung around on old coastal dunes, doing whatever they did (sex on the beach?).

#51945: — 12/04  at  02:17 PM
Maybe some Permian restaurant had a yearly "Hibbertopterusfest". A squeeze of lemon with the drawn butter, please. The redneck boy deep inside can't resist gigantic prehistoric crawdads...

You bio guys already know about the Prehistoric Planet Store, but they have some nice eurypterid casts, suitable for framing:
http://www.paleoclones.com/marine/index.htm

#51946: — 12/04  at  02:21 PM
Brings "The Simpsons" Dr. Hibbert to mind...I don't see why they would be frightening, they were just enormous pillbugs, as we call them here in Seattle. No evidence that they'd be biters, is there?
In fact, while I was bouldering along a rocky coastline in Oregon a few eyars ago, I was traversing using a horizontal finger crack, when out of the crack emerged several creatures that looked like your hibbertopterus, only about 1 1/2 inches long...and, in fact, the rocks I was climbing on looked very much like the ones you've put up here. Latter day sea scorpions?

#51947: — 12/04  at  02:32 PM

That's like something out of Dr Who.

Are you thinking of the cybermen's silverfish-type critters but bigger? Its current location could even be a Dr.Who film set - like their favourite quarry.

#51949: — 12/04  at  03:04 PM
"Unfortunately"? In whose opinion? At least it couldn't have run very fast, but I wouldn't have liked to have bumped into it in the water...

#51951: — 12/04  at  03:20 PM
Living in western new york, I always dreamed of finding a eurypterid (the state fossil!) but even though they are supposed to be common there (as compared to the rest of the world) I never managed to get to an outcrop of bertie limestone. :(

#51961: — 12/04  at  04:04 PM
Here's a link to a story on the arthropod tracks near Kingston Miguelito referred to: http://www.geotimes.org/june02/NN_steps.html

I have to admit that I don't think of pots and dinner when I think of arthropods in general. I love things like lobster (my traditional birthday dinner is a bisque of lobster, shrimp, crab, scallops and sole) but I don't like to think of them as bugs. I'm glad at least that nobody has yet discovered a 2m long earwig. Shudder. Not sure even PZ would be interested in chowing down on one of those.

#51962: — 12/04  at  04:20 PM
Googling around found this (http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Palaeofiles/Traces/locomotion/loco.html):

As well as the gait ratio, an arthropod's walking style is defined by its opposite and successive phase differences, or the time difference between moving legs on opposite and the same sides of the body. Arthropods walking in phase move the same leg on each side of the body at the same time. This walking technique is less stable than out-of-phase walking, and is generally practised by arthropods walking sub-aqueously.
Fossilised trackways sometimes display a switch by the producer from an in-phase to an out-of-phase technique. For example a eurypterid trackway (eurypterids are an extinct group of chelicerates) from the Carboniferous of Wales demonstrates just this kind of switch from in-phase to out-of-phase walking by the producer. This has been interpreted as the animal changing from a swimming to a walking style of locomotion as it emerged from shallow water.

It is just so inexpressibly cool that we have a trackway of an amphibious bug in the act of moving from water onto land.

#51990: — 12/04  at  07:38 PM
I just saw a very nice recreation of this creature (at least, this is what they appeared to be referring to) in a drama-documentary running on Animal Planet entitled "Chased by Sea Monsters".

The format is that of some divers with a time machine going back to various eras and diving amongst the (presumaby CGI, but could be some animantronics in there, I suppose) ancient creatures.

My kids are watching it right now. They love stuff like that

#51992: — 12/04  at  07:42 PM
They just don't make 'em like they used to. I wish we still had the giant insects.

#51994: Abie — 12/04  at  07:56 PM
"I wish we still had the giant insects."

I agree. Because they make it easier to aim...

#52001: — 12/04  at  09:09 PM
a) Interesting. It looks quite a bit like a horseshoe crab - which is what the eurypterids were thought to be aligned to. Another point for evo theory.

b) Eh, the trackways thing? We've had known terrestrial eurypterid tracks on display in the Western Australian Museum for as long as I can remember, and I've been going there 18 years..

#52018: — 12/04  at  11:07 PM
I don't know about pots and melted butter - it may end up tasting like horseshoe crabs, which paleontologist Richard Fortey has written of as having a distinctly acquired taste.

#52020: — 12/05  at  12:09 AM
Yeah, they look like horseshoe crab and probably tasted as bad as them. In fact, the horseshoe crab (which is no crab at all) may be a direct descendant of this giant bedbug.

#52024: — 12/05  at  01:03 AM
First rule of the culinary arts of extinct giant arthropods: anything tastes good given enough butter.

#52033: — 12/05  at  06:04 AM
Would the creationists have us believe that this was on Noah's ark? I can just see Mrs Noah whacking it with a broom, shouting "Get back, you nasty Hibbertopterus!"

#52048: — 12/05  at  09:04 AM
Hey, SEF, don't knock the Beeb's location work. As JPL and NASA reveal more of the solar system to us, they find more and more places that look like gravel pits.

Mars? A dusty gravel pit. Mercury? A hot gravel pit. Titan? An icy gravel pit.

Okay, I'll give you Io looks more like the lava planet in Star Wars Ep III, but everything else is either gravel or ice.

#52068: Keith Douglas — 12/05  at  09:53 AM
Did these creatures have open or closed circulatory systems? Quite a big creature for an open ...

#52074: — 12/05  at  10:09 AM
That is a very pretty critter...

#52134: — 12/05  at  01:16 PM

As JPL and NASA reveal more of the solar system to us, they find more and more places that look like gravel pits.

For the conspiracy nutters, that would just be further evidence that NASA et al have been filming in gravel pits. :-D

#52240: John McKay — 12/05  at  06:38 PM
It probably crawled up on the beach to chase away some Raelian intelligent designers.

#52399: — 12/06  at  11:05 AM
Just curious, because I know you (PZ, that is) commented on how much pain fish feel when you kill them (which made me rethink the way I killed trout when fishing as a kid...).

How much pain to crabs and lobsters feel when you toss 'em in? We're warm-blooded, and 110 degree tap water hurts; I can't imagine how much pain a cold-blooded sea-creature feels when tossed into 200 degree steam.

Of course, it's not like they're around to think about it for long...