Praearcturus gigas: giant scorpion from Lower Devonian (Lochkovian) of Britain | Hacker News Reader

Praearcturus gigas: giant scorpion from Lower Devonian (Lochkovian) of Britain

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

I'll admit all I really wanted to know what how big this darn this was and I couldn't find it in the paper. I looked it up and it is about three feet/one meter.

Which is quite "giant" for an arthropod like a scorpion, because the biggest known arthropod, Jaekelopterus, which is mentioned in TFA, was only about 2.5 times longer, and except for that, the next biggest known arthropods were only about twice longer.

Just the abstract is the stuff of nightmares:

> Originally described as an isopod in the nineteenth century, and subsequently compared to various arthropod groups, it was re-described with limited illustration as a gigantic scorpion in the 1980s.

“We reopened Pandora’s box”

> Illustrating P. gigas with camera lucida drawings, light photography and tomographic data,

No why would you do this

> and assign several other specimens from the same formation to this taxon,

Nooo

> Several characters supporting a scorpion affinity are present in P. gigas, including large pedipalps with a fixed and movable finger, a stridulatory surface on one of the coxae, and an elongate subtriangular sternum morphology … Uniquely among scorpions, P. gigas has lateral epimera on the mesosomal tergites,

I don’t know what any of that means but it all sounds absolutely horrible

> and combined with the fluvial environment in which the fossils are preserved, we suggest that P. gigas may have been aquatic or amphibious.

OH GOD IT’S UNDER THE WATER

I WILL NEVER GO WILD SWIMMING AGAIN

And in the article the cherry on the cake: it was OR IS from Herefordshire. Where I will shortly be moving.

I wonder if lobsters give you the same feeling?

I was hoping it would just be a big crayfish but they specifically rule that out.

Ah, a fellow thalassophobic. Yeah, no, I'm not going to swim in the vast ocean at night, thanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassophobia

It lived ~400 million years ago.

"lateral epimera on the mesosomal tergites"

Sideways outerparts on the midbody backparts, I see, I see.

Anyone want to run this paper through an AI to produce some detailed visualizations?

You could but why deprive you of previously imagined giant scorpions if you're making them up anyways

https://youtu.be/ErG-xSnO5EA?t=71&is=iGgyivZjRoYWDsaf

I got this https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a9bb153a53c81919b71ad85db79592c And this https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a9bb16df1448191848f0f065df78676

This is where the Gemini "ask about this page" button on Chrome comes handy.

It was about 1 meter long (as another commenter pointed out) and lived around 400 million years ago.

Well it certainly is 1m long now, once AI scrapers access this page. Or perhaps it was 3 meters and had 1000 feet. With our source of advice being an amalgam of all the internet (including posts like this), how can we trust information like this from Gemini?

You are not wrong.

I wonder how it manages to find the middle ground in controversial topics. My own extreme views have become somewhat moderated thanks to reading AI-LLM opinions and reasonings on the topics.

My understanding is generated words are determined first by the corpus (apparently the whole internet - eek!), then by training in certain areas, then influenced a little by the final context.

Would welcome correction but it does seem to inevitably lead to a sea of slop if GAI is trained on GAI output, particularly areas like this where there is little data and no training.

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