A 50 kilogram millipede fossil is unearthed when a block of sandstone is crushed open at Northumberland, in England's north-east, revealing a meat-eating creature that was 2.5m long and lived more than 100 million years before the dinosaurs.
"We were visiting the beach to look at the general geology, and we saw a boulder had recently fallen from the cliff and split in two.
With a width of 55cm, and an estimated weight of more than 50 kilograms, the millipede would have been the largest invertebrate — animals without a backbone — in recorded history.Researcher Anthony Shillito uses a pneumatic drill to extract the millipede fossil. Only the third Arthropleura fossil to have been unearthed, it is considered more significant than the two previous discoveries, both in Germany.
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