Bring on the Giant Insects

When I have some spare time on my hands, I like to explore weird science. And nothing was more weird on this Earth (and that's saying a LOT!) than the giant insects of the Pennsylvanian (Late Paleozoic) Era.

What kind of giant bugs am I talking about?

• Dragonflies with 28-inch wingspans
• Spiders with bodies over 13 inches wide and leg-spans over 27 inches
• Scorpions about two-feet long, give or take a scream.
• Giant millipedes that were 6 1/2-feet long and 19 inches wide. Heck, those aren't millepedes, those are Godzillapedes!
  

So why did all these giant bugs evolve? And why don't we have them now? After all, a 2-foot-long scorpion would kick serious ass!

One factor is lack of predators, sure. But another is that the oxygen content of the air was much, much higher. Currently oxygen is 18% of the air we breathe. Back in the Pennsylvanian, it was about 35%.

This allowed the giant bugs to more easily oxygenate their tissues, despite their primitive ("pitiful earth creatures!") lung structure.

The Pennsylvanian ended in two "pulses." The first was a glacial pulse -- it got cold. Then we got your basic meteor impact, probably in the tropics somewhere. And that leveled the playing field enough for modern fauna to evolve (sorry, Intelligent Designers) and dominate the Paleozoic fauna.

So we can thank an asteriod impact for allowing things like us to evolve. You can decide if God was the one who flicked the fatal asterioid toward the Earth like some cosmic-scale game of marbles.

After we destroy the world as we know it with global warming, I wonder what will evolve to replace us?

Here's the leading candidate... [CLICK HERE]

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