Brontoscorpio

You can tell when I've been watching the Discovery channels, because I wind up babbling happily in posts like this...

Bronotoscorpio Anglicus, whose smaller ancestor was the first creature to develop "eyes," which it had multi-faceted on top of its head. It was sort of like a modern day scorpion, except it was huge.

There was another version of it, a later evolutionary step (they say) that was over ten feet long, but I didn't catch the name properly and thus wasn't able to do any further reading on it.

Here's some halfway useful information from Wikipedia about the creature.

Honestly, I've always thought that if you need to create an alien race for your sci-fi novel, you could do a lot worse than to look underwater, whether in the far past or int he present. Especially deep sea creatures. I knwo we've talked about my fascination with marine biology before, though. This is just more of that...

AND, because of its semi-lung sacs (more like absorbent sponges that passively brought in air) they were the first creatures that could make it onto land.

BUT, because of their small and passive lungs, they had to shrink and eventually fell prey to the fish (who evolved into alligator like things) who they had hunted before.

And then, those very same fish got into trouble if they went back into the water, because there were sharks.

....who had even more trouble than any of the others, because the sharks were hunted by Hyneria.

It was a great program.

I'm such a loser. I sit there and watch these shows with a notebook and pen, and when they name a creature (or a time period, or a nebula, or a theory, or a discovery, or whatever....) I write it down and the go read everything I can find online about it.

davids said:

Yah you are a loser Pete-after all who the hell needs to do research-not us genius writers-imagination and all that? Actually referring to that silly so-called newby post where the dude thought he was pullin the wool over our eyes-eyes? what eyes. The one Dawno shut down. Seriously think it is admirable that you do what you do-wish I knew why that was losing?

Click to expand...

And I wish I knew where your periods went.

I don't know which Newbieyou mean, I'm afraid. I probably missed that one.

And evne if it makes me the biggest loser everywhere, I'm not stopping. It's way too much fun reading all this stuff. I'm reading about supermassive black holes right now.

thanks for the period. I'll keep it with me always.

I'm reading about the process of discovering that there are supermassive black holes not only at the hearts of neighboring galaxies and clusters, but at the heart of the Milky Way too. Which is....a bit alarming.

But this is probably material for a whole new science thread!