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You don’t name a sea creature after an ancient Greek warship unless it’s built like a predator. That’s certainly true of the recently discovered Pentecopterus, a giant sea scorpion with the sleek features of a penteconter, one of the first Greek galley ships. A research team says Pentecopterus lived 467 million years ago and could grow to nearly six feet, with a long head shield, a narrow body, and large, grasping limbs for trapping prey.
It is the oldest described eurypterid—a group of aquatic arthropods that are ancestors of modern spiders, lobsters, and ticks. Geologists discovered the fossil bed in a meteorite crater by the Upper Iowa River in northeastern Iowa. Fossils were then unearthed and collected by temporarily damming the river in 2010. The fossil-rich site yielded both adult and juvenile Pentecopterus specimens, giving the researchers a wealth of data about the animal’s development.Image credit: Patrick Lynch/Yale University
