On a property near Theodore, in central Queensland, a farmer named Nick Freeman picked up a slab of rock.<\/p>\n
Something was printed across the surface of it, a dense pattern of raised scales and ridges<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So he did the right thing with it and handed the slab over to the Queensland Museum.<\/p>\n Where it went into a drawer, and stayed there for three decades<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The label it earned, in the curator’s own words, was the too hard basket<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The problem was that the fossil is a fragment rather than an animal.<\/p>\n It is a piece of cuticle, the tough outer shell of something that moulted and grew, and it carries no head, no legs and no tail.<\/p>\n Which leaves ornamentation, the pattern on the shell, as almost the only clue available<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Andrew Rozefelds, the curator who kept coming back to it, worked out early that it had to be an arthropod of some kind<\/strong>, something with a jointed shell.<\/p>\n And the size of it, the ornamentation across the shell and the place it turned up all pointed the same way.<\/p>\n They pointed at a eurypterid, the group most people know as the sea scorpions<\/strong>, a name that has caused confusion ever since it was coined.<\/p>\n But pointing at a group is not the same as naming a species, and there the trail went cold for years.<\/p>\n Because a eurypterid is not a small thing to have living in your river.<\/p>\n This one ran to more than three feet<\/strong>, which made it among the largest predators in the freshwater system it hunted.<\/p>\n And that is the first correction worth making. Despite the name, this animal was not in the sea at all, but in lakes and rivers inland.<\/p>\n The group as a whole lasted more than 200 million years<\/strong>, which is longer than the dinosaurs managed.<\/p>\n Some of them were monsters. The largest known, from Germany, reached about eight feet<\/strong> and remains the biggest arthropod that has ever lived.<\/p>\n They were already ancient when the first dinosaur appeared, and by then most of them were gone.<\/p>\n Then the world closed, and a museum with no visitors coming through the door is a museum with time on its hands.<\/p>\n During the closures of 2020 and 2021, Rozefelds pulled the Theodore slab back out and worked the problem properly.<\/p>\n He also brought in Markus Poschmann<\/strong>, a specialist in Germany who works on exactly these animals.<\/p>\n Between them the fragment finally resolved into something genuinely new, and it was given a name that honours the family who found it and handed it in.<\/p>\n The date is what made everyone sit up. The rock it came from is about 252 million years<\/strong> old.<\/p>\n That puts the animal at least 11 million years younger<\/strong> than any other eurypterid ever recorded, anywhere.<\/p>\n Which makes this fragment the final entry<\/strong> in a ledger that had been running for 200 million years.<\/p>\n Because 252 million years ago is the doorstep of the end Permian extinction, the worst event in the history of animal life, as the museum<\/a> set out when it announced the work.<\/p>\n Something like four out of five<\/strong> marine species disappeared inside a geological blink, and the eurypterids went with them.<\/p>\n They had come through every earlier crisis in that long run. They did not come through this one<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The description was published in the journal Historical Biology at the end of 2021, as the coverage<\/a> of the paper reported.<\/p>\n So a single unlabelled slab from a Queensland paddock now marks the last known moment of an entire order of animals, in the same way a solar site<\/a> or an offshore project<\/a> ends up documenting far more than it was built to measure.<\/p>\n People usually reach for the horseshoe crab at this point, and that is not quite right either.<\/p>\n Horseshoe crabs are cousins, in the same broad family of animals, but they are not the closest<\/strong> living link.<\/p>\n The nearest surviving relatives of a sea scorpion are the ones already living in your garden shed and under your porch.<\/p>\n Scorpions and spiders sit closer on the tree than anything crawling up an Atlantic beach in spring.<\/p>\n Which is a strange thing to hold in your head, that the animal in the slab has no direct descendants<\/strong> at all.<\/p>\n Its whole lineage stops at that one rock face in central Queensland, and everything that came afterwards belongs to some other branch entirely.<\/p>\n And it took a farmer, a full lockdown and a specialist in Germany<\/strong> to work out that the ledger closed there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On a property near Theodore, in central Queensland, a farmer named Nick Freeman picked up a slab of rock. Something was printed across the surface of it, a dense pattern of raised scales and ridges. So he did the right thing with it and handed the slab over to the Queensland Museum. Where it went into … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":30970,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"252 million year","rank_math_title":"Lockdown gave a Queensland curator time to reopen a 3 decade old fossil case, and the sea scorpion he identified is the last one that ever lived, dying out with the end Permian extinction","rank_math_description":"A fossil found on an Australian farm in the 1990s turned out to be the world's last known sea scorpion, and its surprising living relative changes the who","footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What the farmer actually picked up<\/h2>\n
The animal on the other end of that fragment<\/h2>\n
Why a lockdown solved it<\/h2>\n
The last one, and what happened next<\/h2>\n
What is actually left of them<\/h2>\n