Sea scorpions

Habitats

The following habitats are found across the Sea scorpions distribution range. Find out more about these environments, what it takes to live there and what else inhabits them.

• Sea bed
• Estuaries
• Intertidal zone
• Lakes and ponds
• Shallow seas
• Rivers and streams
• Wetlands

Behaviours

Discover what these behaviours are and how different plants and animals use them.

• Adapted to swimming
• Moulting
• Egg layer
• Predator
• Adapted to running

What their world was like

Coal forests
Desert Earth

What killed them

Permian mass extinction
The Permian mass extinction has been nicknamed The Great Dying, since a staggering 96% of species died out. All life on Earth today is descended from the 4% of species that survived.

Fossil types

Learn more about the other animals and plants that also form these fossils.

Trace fossils
It's not only the actual bodily remains of dead animals and plants that can become fossils. Things created or left behind by animals can also fossilise, such as their footprints, burrows and dung.

About

Eurypterids (sea scorpions) are an extinct group of arthropods related to arachnids which include the largest known arthropods that ever lived. They are members of the extinct order Eurypterida (Chelicerata); which is the most diverse Paleozoic chelicerate order in terms of species. The name Eurypterida comes from the Greek word eury- meaning "broad" or "wide" and the Greek word pteron meaning "wing", for the pair of wide swimming appendages on the first fossil eurypterids discovered. Eurypterids predate the earliest fishes. The largest, such as Jaekelopterus, reached 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) in length, but most species were less than 20 centimetres (8 in). They were formidable predators that thrived in warm shallow water, in both seas and lakes, in the Ordovician to Permian from 460 to 248 million years ago. Although informally called "sea scorpions", only the earliest ones were marine (later ones lived in brackish or freshwater), and they were not true scorpions. According to theory, the move from the sea to fresh water probably occurred by the Pennsylvanian subperiod. Eurypterids are believed to have undergone ecdysis, making their significance in ecosystems difficult to assess, because it can be difficult to tell a fossil moult from a true fossil carcass. They went extinct during the Permian–Triassic extinction event 252.2 million years ago, and their fossils have a near global distribution.

About two dozen families of eurypterids are known. Perhaps the best-known genus of eurypterid is Eurypterus, of which around 16 fossil species are known. The genus Eurypterus was described in 1825 by James Ellsworth De Kay, a zoologist. He recognized the arthropod nature of the first ever described eurypterid specimen, found by Dr. S. L. Mitchill. In 1984, that species, Eurypterus remipes was named the state fossil of New York.

Read more at Wikipedia