Oldest-Known Scorpion Lived 437 Million Years Ago And Could Breathe In Ocean And On Land

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – The oldest-known scorpion species, a prehistoric animal from about 437 million years ago, has been identified by researchers.

The researchers found that the animal – named Parioscorpio venator – likely had the capacity to breathe in both ancient oceans and on land.

The fossil (left) was unearthed in Wisconsin in 1985. Scientists analyzed it and discovered the ancient animal’s respiratory and circulatory organs (center) were near-identical to those of a modern-day scorpion (right). Credit: Andrew Wendruff

The genus name means “progenitor scorpion,” and the species name means “hunter.”

“We’re looking at the oldest known scorpion — the oldest known member of the arachnid lineage, which has been one of the most successful land-going creatures in all of Earth history,” Loren Babcock, an author of the study and a professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University, said in a press release.

“And beyond that, what is of even greater significance is that we’ve identified a mechanism by which animals made that critical transition from a marine habitat to a terrestrial habitat. It provides a model for other kinds of animals that have made that transition including, potentially, vertebrate animals. It’s a groundbreaking discovery.”

The “hunter scorpion” fossils were unearthed in 1985 from a site in Wisconsin that was once a small pool at the base of an island cliff face. They had remained unstudied in a museum at the University of Wisconsin for more than 30 years when one of Babcock’s doctoral students, Andrew Wendruff — now an adjunct professor at Otterbein University in Westerville — decided to examine the fossils in detail.

The earliest known scorpion to that point had been found in Scotland and dated to about 434 million years ago. Scorpions, paleontologists knew, were one of the first animals to live on land full-time.

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The Wisconsin fossils are between 1 million and 3 million years older than the fossil from Scotland. They figured out how old this scorpion was from other fossils in the same formation. Those fossils came from creatures that scientists think lived between 436.5 and 437.5 million years ago, during the early part of the Silurian period, the third period in the Paleozoic era.

This scorpion is about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) long — about the same size as many scorpions in the world today. And, Babcock said, it shows a crucial evolutionary link between the way ancient ancestors of scorpions respired underwater and the way modern-day scorpions breathe on land. Internally, the respiratory-circulatory system has a structure just like that found in today’s scorpions.

“The inner workings of the respiratory-circulatory system in this animal are, shape-wise, identical to those of the arachnids and scorpions that breathe air exclusively,” Babcock said.

“But it also is incredibly similar to what we recognize in marine arthropods like horseshoe crabs. So, it looks like this scorpion, this lineage, must have been pre-adapted to life on land, meaning they had the morphologic capability to make that transition, even before they first stepped onto land.”

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Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff