This means that E. persephone is the world’s first true millipede, since the word millipede means “thousand feet” in Latin....
BITS ‘N’ PIECES
Scientists in Australia have discovered a new species of millipede that lives 200 feet underground, has no eyes, and scurries around on 1,306 legs.
They named it Eumillipes persephone after Persephone, the Greek goddess and queen of the underworld. But this new invertebrate deserves a crown for another reason: It has the most legs of any creature on Earth, living or dead.
This means that E. persephone is the world’s first true millipede, since the word millipede means “thousand feet” in Latin.
Many millipede species begin life with just eight legs, but as they shed their skin and add new body segments, or rings, they can keep developing more legs, says study leader Paul Marek, a millipede expert at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
The team suspects all these legs allow E. persephone to walk on eight different planes simultaneously. “Since [the Goldfields region of Western Australia] is a subterranean microhabitat with rocks, pebbles, and soil, they’re basically winding their way around these obstacles. Part of your body can be upside down. The other part could be pointing downward, the other part could be pointing upwards. And it’s all based on winding around this three-dimensional kind of matrix,” says Marek.
Hidden from the sun, the creatures evolved to be colourless — a trait shared by many cave-adapted species. The thousand-leggers appear to have evolved cone shaped heads, massive antennae, and a powerful, worm-like locomotion that allows them to barrel through sediments and other tight spaces.
When paleontologists working at the Pterosaurs’ Cemetery unearthed a new fossil creature with a parrot-like beak, they were shocked to learn that they’d found a whole new species of toothless dinosaur. Even stranger, the animal belongs to a group called the ceratosaurians — almost all of which were carnivores.
“The fact that we now have this toothless dinosaur means we have to rethink the evolutionary loss of teeth for all dinosaurs in this group,” says Alexander Kellner, a paleontologist on the team and director of the National Museum of Brazil.
The fossilised skeleton belongs to a new species called Berthasaura leopoldinae that lived between 80 million and 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. The formal name is a nod to Bertha Lutz, an important Brazilian scientist who championed women’s suffrage, and Maria Leopoldina, an Austrian who became Empress of Brazil and was a defender of the natural sciences.
At first, the researchers thought that it was related to Limusaurus inextricabilis, a toothless theropod discovered in northwestern China. Limusaurus lived sometime between 161 million and 156 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. Based on fossils of both adults and juveniles from the same species, scientists know that this ceratosaurian dinosaur lost its teeth as an adolescent and didn’t grow another set.
Berthasaura, on the other hand, never had any teeth at all. It’s the first dinosaur without teeth in Latin America.
