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Man-sized crab creature once roamed the earth

Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas.
Michael Kanellos

Martin Whyte, a paleontologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom has discovered 300 million year old tracks of a large crab-like creature in what was at the time solid land. The discovery is significant because large creatures like this at the time mostly lived in the water.

At the time, living on land was still a relatively recent phenomenon and most land animals were the size of house cats. Hibberopterus, a gigantic member of an extinct species, however, measured 1 meter wide and 1.6 meters long. It had three sets of short legs and probably walked slow.