415-Million-Year-Old Giant Scorpion Reclassified After 155 Years

A fossil that spent 155 years catalogued under the wrong identity has finally been recognised for what it truly was: one of the largest scorpions ever to have lived. Praearcturus gigas, a metre-long predator with formidable pincers, roamed the ancient landscapes of what is now Britain some 415 million years ago, during a Devonian world still learning how to sustain life on land. Its reclassification, driven by a structural comparison with a Canadian species, quietly overturns a century and a half of scientific consensus and pushes the emergence of giant predatory arthropods far deeper into pre