Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 March 1885 — A Silurian Scorpion. [ARTICLE]

A Silurian Scorpion.

Herr Lindstrom, a Stockholm geologist, has found a perfect fossil scorpion in the upper silurian rocks of the Island of Gotland, in Sweden. The cuticle can be distinguished, also the dorsal plates of the abdomen and the cephalothorax. The surface is quite similar in appearance to the scorpions of to-day, and its organization proves it to have lived on land and breathed air. It has been called Pat eophonous Nuncius, and is evidently one of the most ancient of terrestrial animals, the libellules found in the Devonian formation of Canada, having hitherto been esteemed the oldest known. It is remarkable that the four pair of thoracic claws are thick and pointed like those of the embryons of several other tracheates and campodea, a form of claw which does not exist in the known fossil scorpions of the carboniferous era, which in their appendages resemble those of to-day- -Eng ineering.