Giant Cockroaches were Alive Before the Dinosaurs ?!?

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Sledgehammer

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Wednesday November 7 10:39 AM ET

Giant Cockroaches Were Alive Before the Dinosaurs

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Giant cockroaches were not only living in your kitchen long before you ever moved in, they were alive millions of years before the dinosaurs and were big enough to have made even a Tyrannosaurus rex jump.

Scientists said on Wednesday they had found the largest-ever complete fossil of a cockroach. The 300 million-year-old fossil is so complete that the team at Ohio State University can make out the veins on its wings and the bumps on its body.

The roach lived during the Carboniferous period, when Ohio was a giant tropical swamp, Cary Easterday, a graduate student who helped study the fossil, said in a statement.

``Normally, we can only hope to find fossils of shell and bones, because they have minerals in them that increase their chances for preservation, but something unusual about the chemistry of this ancient site preserved organisms without shell or bones with incredible detail,'' Easterday said.

The 3.5 inch-long (9 cm) insect known as Arthropleura pustulatus was so well preserved that Easterday could see its legs and antennae, folded around its body, as well as mouth parts.

Easterday, who presented his team's findings on Wednesday to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Boston, said the fossil cockroach is about twice as big as the average American roach, although just a bit smaller than cockroaches that live in some tropical areas.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011107/od/cockroach_dc_1.html


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"Find the meaning of the act, remember how it goes
Every time you take the water and you swim against the flow
The world is all around us, the days are flying past
And fear is so contagious, but I?m not afraid to laugh"


Neil Finn
 
bigroach.jpg


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Cockroaches are not people too. ?
 
Originally posted by Deathbear's Fly Girl:
bigroach.jpg



YUCK!!!

*spits out food I was eating*

Okay...I'm not hungry anymore...




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"I don't know you,
But you don't know the half of it..."
 
This kind of thing is pretty interesting. I once took an aquatic entomology class and the man who was professing in there all the time (a cool guy) briefly covered the origins of insects. It turns out that the first known flying insect evolved from an aquatic insect, and was an ancestor of the order Ephemeroptera (mayflies). The fossils of these guys are very similar to modern day mayflies. The next flying insect to show up in the fossil record is the dragonfly, which more than likely was feeding almost exclusively on the mayflies. As melon said, these dragonflies were quite large. The man with the chalk had a life-size cardboard cut-out of one, and it was huge!
I later got a job in his lab raising giant water bugs, but another of the tasks he gave me was to sort through some slides of his. There were quite a few photos of insect fossils that he took while in Germany.. hmmmm.. I think it was Germany. I don't remember the name of the place, but many of the fossils were found in a rock quarry.

I hope someday someone builds a remote controlled dragonfly the size of those ancient ones.

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"The dragonflies are busy buzzin me."

R.E.M.
 
There are many different kinds of roaches, even a semi-aquatic one in South America, and some have designs that are actually kinda pretty.

I freak out if I suddenly feel something crawling on me in bed, but if I became aware of a roach crawling on my leg or something, I would be able to calmly grab it and throw it outside.. and then wash my hands.
wink.gif
 
It makes sense. As I read the headline, I immediately thought of the Carboniferous Period, which was marked by gigantic insects, including gigantic dragonflies. This time period, also, is the origin of coal reserves.

I think the headline is needlessly shocking, considering scientists knew of gigantic insects far before this. The preservation of such a fossil, however, is truly interesting.

Melon

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"He had lived through an age when men and women with energy and ruthlessness but without much ability or persistence excelled. And even though most of them had gone under, their ignorance had confused Roy, making him wonder whether the things he had striven to learn, and thought of as 'culture,' were irrelevant. Everything was supposed to be the same: commercials, Beethoven's late quartets, pop records, shopfronts, Freud, multi-coloured hair. Greatness, comparison, value, depth: gone, gone, gone. Anything could give some pleasure; he saw that. But not everything provided the sustenance of a deeper understanding." - Hanif Kureishi, Love in a Blue Time
 
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