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Tiny sea scorpion fossil find in China is rare surprise for scientists
- At just 15cm, new species is one of the smallest unearthed of its kind for giant predator that ruled the oceans for millions of years
- Specimen from about 450 million years ago is also ‘particularly precious’ for China, with most sea scorpions recovered from other parts of the world
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Ling Xinin Beijing
A new species of the long-extinct sea scorpion has been unearthed in southern China, and at just 15cm (5.9 inches) is one of the smallest of its kind ever discovered. The find is also a rarity in China, with most specimens recovered from North America and Europe.
The usually daunting predators, also known as eurypterids, were equipped with a segmented armoured body and jointed limbs but no backbone, and had spiny claws to capture prey.
Some were larger than a modern human.
The discovery by a team of scientists from China and Britain reveals that sea scorpions – which survived the first mass extinction of 445 million years ago and ruled the ancient oceans for more than 20 million years – could also be small.
Scientists already knew that the creatures came in dramatically different sizes and shapes, while surviving in equally diverse environments as they moved from dominating the sea into fresh water before taking their first steps on land.
But the latest find – detailed by the international team in the peer-reviewed Journal of Palaeontology this month – shows how diverse these long-extinct top predators really were.
“The species we found had a total body length of 15cm and probably fed on shrimps, worms and other small-sized food,” said co-author Wang Han, a PhD student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology.
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