''Gondwanascorpio emzantsiensis'' is an extinct Gondwanan scorpion that lived 360 million years ago in the Devonian. Its fossil remains, clearly showing pincer and sting, were discovered in rocks of the Witteberg Group near

Grahamstown Makhanda, also known as Grahamstown, is a town of about 140,000 people in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It is situated about northeast of Port Elizabeth and southwest of East London. Makhanda is the largest town in the Makana ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

. At present, this scorpion is the oldest known land-dwelling animal from Gondwana, which in Devonian times was separated from Laurasia by a deep ocean. At the time, the fossil site was only 15° from the South Pole, but rather than arctic-like tundra, the region was probably wooded, providing ample insect life for food. Previously, only two scorpion species were known from the late Devonian – '' Hubeiscorpio gracilitarsus'' from China and '' Petaloscorpio bureaui'' from Canada. The species was described by Robert Gess of

Wits University The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...

in the journal ''

African Invertebrates ''African Invertebrates'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal that covers the taxonomy, systematics, biogeography, ecology, conservation, and palaeontology of Afrotropical invertebrates, whether terrestrial, freshwater, or ma ...

''. The specific epithet derives from ', the

isiXhosa Xhosa (, ) also isiXhosa as an endonym, is a Nguni language and one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Xhosa is spoken as a first language by approximately 8.2 million people and by another 11 million as a secon ...

word for "south", sometimes used for South Africa. The shale containing the fossil was discovered as far back as 1985 during construction of the N2 bypass outside Grahamstown. The site consists of black carbonaceous shale formed from anaerobic mud deposited in a marine estuary on the Agulhas Sea. A variety of organic remains was found in this setting, including algae, terrestrial plants, and fish. Invertebrate remains are of small bivalves,

ostracod Ostracods, or ostracodes, are a class of the Crustacea (class Ostracoda), sometimes known as seed shrimp. Some 70,000 species (only 13,000 of which are extant) have been identified, grouped into several orders. They are small crustaceans, typi ...

clam shrimp Clam shrimp are a group of bivalved branchiopod crustaceans that resemble the unrelated bivalved molluscs. They are extant and also known from the fossil record, from at least the Devonian period and perhaps before. They were originally classifi ...

, and a

eurypterid Eurypterids, often informally called sea scorpions, are a group of extinct arthropods that form the order Eurypterida. The earliest known eurypterids date to the Darriwilian stage of the Ordovician period 467.3 million years ago. The group is l ...

. Fossil material has been greatly compressed and original tissue replaced by metamorphic mica altered to chlorite during uplift. To prevent rockfalls onto the road from the unstable formation, the steep slopes were cut back again in 1999 and once more in 2007-08. During these upgrades, Gess managed to obtain a large sample of rock blocks with the help of the road construction company, and worked intermittently on exposing their contents. Evidence of early terrestrial animal life, until this discovery, had been found only in northern

Pangaea Pangaea or Pangea () was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million y ...

or Laurasia, currently comprising North America and Asia. Some 416 million years ago at the end of the Silurian period and during the Devonian period, primitive insects of Laurasia were being preyed upon by early scorpions and spiders, whose ancestors had also come from aquatic and marine environments. Initially, life on Earth was restricted to marine environments and migration onto land at first was confined to plants, which evolved into relatively complex organisms during the Devonian period. This plant colonisation was followed by plant and detritus feeders, such as primitive insects and millipedes. With the

Carboniferous period The Carboniferous ( ) is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic that spans 60 million years from the end of the Devonian Period million years ago ( Mya), to the beginning of the Permian Period, million years ago. The name ''Carbonifero ...

, early vertebrates emerged from the water and were feeding on the invertebrates already there. Palaeontologists believe that the presence of this scorpion in Gondwana, in many ways resembling Laurasian taxa, supports the idea of a relatively uniform terrestrial ecosystem by the end of the Devonian. It was characterised by ubiquitous plant genera such as the

index fossil Biostratigraphy is the branch of stratigraphy which focuses on correlating and assigning relative ages of rock strata by using the fossil assemblages contained within them.Hine, Robert. “Biostratigraphy.” ''Oxford Reference: Dictionary of Bio ...

'' Archaeopteris'', which has also been collected from Waterloo Farm. Gondwanan and Laurasian marginal marine ecosystems also tended to resemble each other towards the end of the Devonian, possibly caused by a closing of the gap between Laurasia and Gondwana.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q14834038 Prehistoric scorpions Chelicerata incertae sedis Late Devonian animals Devonian animals of Africa Fossil taxa described in 2013

See also

References