Oops -- Legendary spider "Big Meg" turns out to be sea fossil

[Ediacara]

Oops -- Legendary spider "Big Meg" turns out to be sea fossil

Tue Feb 15, 7:10 PM ET
Science - AFP

PARIS (AFP) - She was "Big Meg," the largest of all spiders that ever strode the Earth.

The 300-million-year-old fossil was so famous that plaster casts of her body are on display in numerous museums and copies can be purchased over the Internet for hundreds of dollars apiece.

As for the original, it was carefully locked away from public view. It was so precious that it was placed in a bank vault pending the outcome of an ownership squabble.

Alas... a quarter of a century after the historic find, it transpires that Megarachne servinei was never a spider, but a rather odd-looking and certainly less exotic species of sea scorpion.

"Big Meg" unleashed huge excitement after her find in Argentina's San Luis province.

No other creature like it had been found.

More at Yahoo

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Almost as funny as...

the Museum of Natural History discovered during the renovation of the Dinosaur Hall that they had the wrong head on the Brontosaurus.

Shit happens when you're dealing with stuff dead for a 100 million years or so.

[Spinzonner]

2. Did they slap the Brontosaurus's forehead when they realized it ?

[Ediacara]

3. They knew all along that it was the wrong head.

When the Brontosaurus was mounted they didn't have a head, so they created something in plaster resembling the only good sauropod head they had that was from a stout sauropod (long necked dinosaur) like Brontosaurus. The sculpted skull was modelled after Camarasaurus, which was well known and stout like Brontosaurus. Very soon afterwards, it was realized that despite its stoutness, Brontosaurus is really very similar to a different sauropod named Diplodocus that was very slender and had a very different head.

The trouble is... The sculpted skull is already ON the mount in a busy museum full of hundreds and thousands of children every single day. It would be a big deal to close the museum and take the skeleton apart, too big a deal to justify initially, although it was eventually done. These are the skulls in question:

Camarasaurus


The Brontosaurus skull old and new


And Diplodocus

[TreasonousBastard]

4. Sounds reasonable, but...

when they redid the place, and put the new head on, the story that went out was that someone simply grabbed the wrong head from the basement years ago.

As I'm sure you know, there's a whole lot of bones lying around in the research and storage areas of the museum, and there's no guarantee they're labelled correctly.

(Then again, even science reporters get the story wrong at times-- it's funnier to say they screwed up.)

[Ediacara]

5. Most bones have a white out dot painted on them

With the speciment number written over the white out. Most fossils (and museum specimens in general) ARE labelled and stored correctly.

[TreasonousBastard]

6. NOW they do...

but that exhibit was set up in 1905, long before whiteout.

Anyway, now I'm curious, so I found:

http://dml.cmnh.org/2004May/msg00383.html

"Finally, there is the matter of the skull. The skull that Marsh used to complete his reconstruction was described by Virginia Tidwell and me as Brachiosaurus (USNM 5730; 1998, Modern Geology 23:69-84). In many ways, this skull does look camarasaurid, hence for many years "Brontosaurus" was said to have the wrong, camarasaurid-like skull. Why did this happen? Most likely it is because Marsh was greatly influenced by M.P. Felch who excavated the skull. Felch wrote to Marsh (June 4, 1884), "The cervical vertebrae mentioned in my last are Brontosaurus as you have figured them - and from their position - skull No. 2 must have belonged with them." Marsh apparently agreed with Felch, thus felt justified in using this skull on reconstruction of a skeleton of Brontosaurus collected several hundred miles away. It certainly made a lot of sense that the robust skeleton of Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus would have a robust, camarasaurid-like skull, rather delicate diplodocid skull that Holland later suggested. It is no wonder that he was reluctant to accept Osborn's challenge to mount the diplodocid-like skull on the Carnegie Museum Apatosaurus."