Mega-millipedes weighing a colossal 50kg once hunted across northern England, archaeologists have revealed.
As long as cars, the creatures owned the area more than 300 million years ago, Chronicle Live reports.
Following the 'fluke' discovery of a fossil at Howick, Northumberland, experts were able to bring to life how big the animal - known as Arthropleura - once was.
They made a fascinating find after a section of cliff fell onto the shore at a Northumberland beach.
Although they say it was likely to have a mainly nutrient-rich plant diet, it could have also been a predator - feasting on other invertebrates or small amphibians to become so large.
The discovery of the fossil was made when a former PhD student spotted a large block of sandstone that had fallen while walking along the coast in January 2018.
Years of study was then undertaken to get to the bottom of it.
Dr Neil Davies, from Cambridge University’s Department of Earth Sciences and lead author of a paper on the fossil, said: “It was a complete fluke of a discovery.
“The way the boulder had fallen, it had cracked open and perfectly exposed the fossil, which one of our former PhD students happened to spot when walking by.
“While we can’t know for sure what they ate, there were plenty of nutritious nuts and seeds available in the leaf litter at the time, and they may even have been predators that fed off other invertebrates and even small vertebrates such as amphibians.”
Experts believe the fossil represents just a section of the creature’s exoskeleton that it shed near a river bed, which was then preserved by sand.
The segment is about 75 centimetres long, leading scientists to believe its entire body could have measured around 2.7m long and weighed 50kg.
The remains of the creature date from the Carboniferous Period, more than 100 million years before the Age of Dinosaurs.
