Once again science has proven life to be at least as strange as fiction (this makes me very happy). According to a report from the British Royal Society, a creature has been discovered which lived 390 million years ago that looked like an 8-foot long scorpion. The largest bug ever found, this thing could rip your leg off and eat it before you could whistle Dixie. And all this coming after it’s already been declared that all the cool dinosaurs have been discovered.
Dr Simon Braddy, University of Bristol said, “This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realised, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.”
The interesting part of this, to me at least, is that the creature in question, Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae, bears a striking resemblance to the creatures Stephen King created when he wrote the second book of the Dark Tower series. In The Drawing of the Three, Roland is met by some giant bug-looking creatures with bad dispositions which emerge from the sea and promptly snap off a portion of his foot and a couple of fingers with their giant pincers. In the book they’re referred to as ‘lobstrosities.’
Also interestingly, the Royal Society has pompously proclaimed this to be the “largest arthropod to have ever evolved,” which, in my mind, minimizes the overall effect of the discovery’s brilliance. Science is as science does though, I guess, and in this case they’ve just opened themselves up to being proven wrong once again. Proclamations of this sort are totally unnecessary and, rather than having the desired effect of creating an air of genius around the presenter, it makes them seem foolish. The depths of the oceans are still largely unexplored; new life is discovered continuously, even in this age of understanding, on the ground as well as in the sea, so to make such a statement which suggests they’ve discovered all there is to discover of any species that has ever existed on Earth is absolute absurdity. The implications go much deeper, too: having made this egregious statement, we can’t reliably accept that it could possibly be known when this creature might have existed, much less that the 390 million-year estimate could be even remotely correct (I saw one last week in the Coosa River in south Shelby County).
Still, it is a landmark discovery that excites my imagination in ways that only science fiction or fantasy novels ordinarily do. They can call it Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae if they like, but for me this thing will always be a lobstrosity. They should rename it Jaekelopterus Kingeaus.
