World's largest scorpion roamed UK 400 million years ago, says expert

Experts have identified a giant scorpion that lived about 415 million years ago, which they believe may be the largest scorpion ever discovered. Dr Richard Howard of the Natural History Museum, who led the study, said fossil fragments suggested the Praearcturus gigas scorpion had 16cm-long pincers and a body about one metre long. The species was identified from fossils found in the St Maughan's Sandstone Formation, which spans Powys in Wales, and Herefordshire and Worcestershire in England. The scorpion lived during the Early Devonian period, about 415 million years ago. Howard said the study had been a "very long time" in the making, with work on the fossils dating back to about 2008. The fossils were first discovered in Herefordshire in the 1870s, with further finds made in Birmingham in the 1970s and Tredomen Quarry in Powys in the 2010s. For more than 150 years, scientists were unsure what animal the fossils belonged to. Howard said that, although some researchers suggested in the 1980s that they were from a scorpion, many believed they came from a giant crustacean because the remains were incomplete. "They described it nicely, but they didn't really have any advanced images of