Guest “When Sci-Fi predicted paleontology” by David Middleton
Anyone else out there remember this classically awful 1957 science fiction movie?
It scared the bejesus out of me when I was it in the late 1960’s when I was 9 or 10 years old.
Well guess what?
Largest ever millipede’s head revealed by 300-million-year-old fossils
By James Ashworth
First published 9 October 2024
Well-preserved fossils uncovered in France have revealed new insights into one of the biggest invertebrates to ever walk on Earth.
Arthropleura was a millipede-like animal which lived more than 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period, with some individuals reaching more than two metres long.
The head of one of history’s biggest arthropods has been revealed in detail for the first time.
Arthropleura is an arthropod, the group containing insects, crustaceans, arachnids and their relatives. For many years, only fossils of its body survived, which saw it placed among the earliest millipedes. Now, the discovery of the first complete head has revealed a surprising twist.
While the new fossils are not from fully grown Arthropleura, some of which reached 2.6 metres long, they reveal important characteristics. Most notably, the head has some features of early centipedes, suggesting millipedes and centipedes might be more closely related than previously accepted.
[…]
While Arthropleura wasn’t a mollusk, the first thing I thought of when I read the article was The Monster That Challenged the World.
INTRODUCTION
The iconic myriapod Arthropleura is a Carboniferous-Permian arthropod renowned for its record-breaking gigantism (1), inhabiting forest environments near the equatorial belt (2) from ~346 million to 290 million years ago (Ma) (Visean to Sakmarian) (1)
[…]
Don’t you love it when science imitates science fiction? (Sarcasm purely intentional). Of course, Arthropleura lived when Earth’s atmospheric oxygen concentration was at its highest level of the Phanerozoic Eon, enabling insects, arthropods, crustaceans and other creepy-crawlers to grow to 1950’s Sic-Fi sizes…
While The Monster That Challenged the World was just one of many giant “bugs” that only lived in classically bad 1950’s Sci-Fi movies.
References
Berner, Robert A. Atmospheric oxygen over Phanerozoic time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 1999, 96 (20) 10955-10957; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.96.20.10955
Lhéritier, Mickaël et al., Head anatomy and phylogenomics show the Carboniferous giant Arthropleura belonged to a millipede-centipede group. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp6362(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp6362
Pillola, Gian & Zoboli, Daniel. (2021). First occurrence of Arthropleura armata (Myriapoda) in the Moscovian (Carboniferous) of SW Sardinia (Italy). Bollettino della Societa Paleontologica Italiana. 60. 49-54. 10.4435/BSPI.2021.01.
Like insects, centipedes do not “breathe”, but rely on spiracules. Those giant ants in B movies would rapidly suffocate.
That, and the tensile strength of chitin is such that any any of that size would snap all of its legs the first time it tried to walk anywhere.
Mass scales by volume while muscle motor strength scales by cross-sectional area. The exoskeletal constraints impose limits on growth since the mass of the exoskeleton would exponentially exceed the ability of the muscle to move it.
I remember this same sort of discussion in entomology class about 50 years ago. If an insect was evolving to be larger it would simultaneously be evolving methods to improve gas exchange. Evolving to be bigger is not simply a scaling up exercise of it existing physiology, it implies evolving the mechanisms to cope with greater bulk. Similarly for George in SanDiego, when you have exhaustively analysed all the ways in which chitin can be engineered to support more weight, nature will find the ways you didn’t think of.
The supposition is that ancestral arthropods looked more like trilobites, with a gill branch on each of multiple legs. Various lineages lost either the walking branch, or the gill branch on some legs. As ancestral insects were presumably small, losing gills completely was practical, but reversing such a loss is something genetically difficult to do. Spiders still have internal gills, so they can be significantly larger.
Story tip+ https://order-order.com/2024/10/10/government-spaffs-200000-on-how-star-wars-can-solve-climate-change/
Speaking of science fiction…
the farce is strong with this one
British readers will know that the most dangerous creature in the UK right now is the Millipede:
Ed Milipede has been elected as the new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero following the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the general election.
He is truly nuts and voracious in his ludicrous pursuit of net zero.
Mad red Ed – a saprophagous macroarthropod. Doesn’t react well to bacon.
I grew up in Paradise, and we used to watch Bob Wilkins Friday (Saturday?) night creature features (Ch 12 KHSL out of Chico or Ch 3 KCRA ou of Sacramento; I don’t remember now if he was on just one or both). He was an insurance salesman or furniture or something. He sat in a plain director’s chair, smoking some big cigar, and he’d tell you what the movie was and that some other channel had something better and you shouldn’t waste your time with his cheapo movie. Commercial breaks usually began with a placard tell you to try that other channel, or making rude (for 1960s) comments about the cheapo movie you were still stupid enough to be watching. He was absolutely the greatest.
There were two cheapo movies that scared the pemmican out of us. Both were dubbed Japanese movies about a sailing ship stranded on your typical desert island. In one, the crew were trapped in a house with floor joists and no floor while giant radioactive rats tried to nibble their toes. The other involved giant radioactive mushrooms. For all I remember now, they could have been made on the same sets, same cast and crew, even at the same time. But they terrified us.
The worst part was getting back to bed. First one to leave missed the ending, but got to turn the lights on and get under the covers; last one to leave had to turn the lights out and get in bed in the dark. Plus, we had one of those tall directional antennas which had to be rotated manually … in the dark … with your hands buried in the ivy holding that cold steel pipe …
Great times. I wouldn’t trade those memories for nuttin’.
Mystery Science Theater 0000?
Like when I was a little kid breaking the ice in the stock watering barrels and snuggling up to the cows for warmth as I was milking them … this in the Mojave Desert. And fighting with 3 brothers with any weapon that came to hand.
Whenever my older sister and I would watch a scary movie, she would make me go upstairs first. Once i figured out what she was doing, I would go up and say “Nothing up here… AAAAHHHHHH!!!” and then go quiet. She stopped doing it after that.
David, why did you end the movie clip right before the creature tore the clothes off that woman?
Humor is a difficult concept.
I watched the full movie last night. No where was there even a slim chance for the monster to disrobe the woman.
LOL
One of my most vivid early memories is reading about extinct ‘dragonflies’ with a 3 foot wingspan. They seem to have been downsized a little bit since, perhaps up to 2 and a half feet, but you still wouldn’t want one buzzing around your head!
If I find the time, I’ll paste Al Gore’s face on that thing.
Five minutes of my time on earth that I won’t get back:
In fairness, you did it to yourself.
And I spent productive time on it figuring out how to do it faster with better image manipulation:
Meanwhile in a galaxy far, far away
In the latest episode of out of this world government spending, £200,000 of taxpayer money is being used to fund research that aims to tackle climate change…through Star Wars. This is not a Sith trick…
UK Innovation and Research, a state-funded body, has handed over the money to Open University for a project titled “Using Star Wars to Improve Sector Sustainability Practices.” The study aims to draw parallels between environmental challenges in the Star Warsuniverse—such as the destruction of Alderaan—and real-world climate issues.
https://order-order.com/2024/10/10/government-spaffs-200000-on-how-star-wars-can-solve-climate-change/
May the farce be with you.
Too slow..! 😉
Just watch out for Dark Helmet
I see your schwarz is almost as big as mine…
Great force in that farce comment. My scare was The Thing from Outer Space where the scientist said that it had to be saved for science, and of course he became sacrificed. The danger of pure science?
Well, at least the screen play didn’t invoke ‘radiation’ as the deus ex machina for the monster’s return. I’m certain a lot of resistance to nuclear power springs from 50’s / 60’s sci-fi movies.
Soviet Russia realized that they could never offer their subjects anything approaching the kind of standard of living enjoyed by the citizens of the Western powers; so they decided to try to convince the citizens of the Western powers to diminish their own standard of living by opposing nuclear energy and by embracing radical environmentalism. Modern progressives remind me of Tanru/Nomad from that Star Trek episode, still trying to execute the programming installed by a society that’s long extinct.
That, too – quite the coincidence that Earth Day coincides with the birthday of one V. Lenin, eh? Speaking of progressives, sci-fi and executing the programming of long extinct societies, I highly recommend a viewing of ‘Forbidden Planet’. The similarities between today’s ‘Progressives’ and ‘The Krell’, who provide the back-story to the movie, are amazing.
The movie was broadcast here in the USA on the “Svengoolie” show just a couple of weeks ago. For those in nations not so blessed, Svengoolie is the host of the show, featuring old horror, sci-fi, and monster movies of bygone years, interspersed with bad jokes and puns, various personalities, but also good summary of the cast members and their careers, and often a bit of history on the special effects or filming techniques used in the earlier days of cinema.
But why all that O2? I would think that all those plants were making it, and there must have been lots of C02 in the air to feed all those plants making all that (later) coal. I would so love to visit that world, fascinating!
The higher atmospheric mass also increased the ocean limit temperature from 30C to 33C. So warmer planet was conducive to bigger animals.
Are there any data on atmospheric mass / surface pressure? To my knowledge it is the great blind spot.
Also I have some doubts over oxygen concentrations in the 30% or more. It is an interesting fact that basically nothing can burn at a 15% oxygen. At 30% however everything would burn like crazy, making the land not-so-habitable.
Then it is true, with higher oxygen levels you can explain how insects could grow much larger. However, it will not change fundamental aerodynamics. There we have the problem of huge Pterosauria. They were simply too large to fly, by todays standards.
So the discussion cerntered over their estimated mass. A 12m wingspan, 6m long, with a beak to fit in a whole human, Quetzalcoatlus would weight only 100kg, then it could easily be able to fly, aerodynamicaly. Physiologically however that makes no sense. You would rather expext some 500kg to make it look reasonable. But then again it could not fly.
The only way to overcome this problem, and it is the same thing with giant insects, is by assuming higher atmospheric pressure. And that again has direct implications on the paleo-climate. The only substantial way to elevate the GHE is by increasing atmospheric pressure.
“Then it is true, with higher oxygen levels you can explain how insects could grow much larger.”
I suspect it’s not just the oxygen that allowed them to grow so large- there were no predators to keep them small and in hiding. Insects today are preyed on my birds, lizards and other insects.
Oh No! Does this mean that Michael Mann is no longer the world’s greatest worm?
I not only remember the movie, I watched it recently. YouTube turns out to be a huge repository of old movies. I’ve watched more film noir in the past 6 months than I had watched total movies in my life up to that time (I’m 70).
I saw that film in a movie theater in early 1958 when I was 7, and it scared me, too. As I recall, we went to it as part of a friend’s birthday party. It was traumatic; I have avoided horror movies ever since.
Unrelatedly, when I was 12 my school class went to see a geology exhibit at a conference center called Asilomar. They had volcanoes and such made out of colored clay. Many years later I found out that was one of the first conferences where the theory of plate tectonics was presented as the newly accepted paradigm.
So that’s how old I am. I was there when.
Looks like the plebes can get some prime rib from that bug
My daughter studied Peripatus for her Science honours degree back in about 1995 (she now has a PhD and is a Professor of Marine Science). This article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onychophora misses some facts. It does not mention Australia for extant species which she found in the Blue Mts west of Sydney. The Peripatus is in its own phylum and dates back to one of the first creatures to come on land from the sea about 500 million years ago. It probably happened on Gondwanaland before the break up with South America, Africa, India and Australia. The species she studied was 100 to 150mm long. The ejection of slime to capture food interested her. The creature is one of the few still extant from first evolution.
Such creatures could easily be exaggerated.
Your daughter doesn’t work on the Ascidiacea, does she?
And like all well-composed monsters, it’s got a yen for pretty women.