Scorpions have hunted with pincers and sting for 430 million years
Scorpions are predatory arachnids with eight legs, grasping pincers, and a segmented tail that curves forward to a stinger. Their lineage reaches the Silurian, about four hundred thirty million years ago. They thrive especially in deserts yet occupy every continent except Antarctica.
Diet centers on insects and other invertebrates; some species take vertebrates. Pincers restrain prey or fend off attackers; venomous stings serve offense and defense. Courtship is a pincer-to-pincer dance as the male steers the female onto his sperm packet. All known species birth live young, and mothers guard them until exoskeletons harden.
Vast majority of species do not seriously threaten people; healthy adults seldom need care after ordinary stings. About twenty-five species—under one percent—carry potentially lethal venom, causing frequent fatalities where medical care is scarce. Culture weaves them into kilim motifs for protection, the constellation Scorpius, the sign Scorpio, and the myth pairing the giant scorpion opposite Orion in the sky.
Sizes run from the 8.5-millimetre Typhlochactas mitchelli to the 23-centimetre Heterometrus swammerdami. Unusually, the group is richest in the subtropics rather than the tropics, and one species, Orobothriurus crassimanus, has turned up 5,500 metres high in the Andes. Their closest relatives are pseudoscorpions, while the extinct eurypterids, nicknamed sea scorpions, are not scorpions at all. Fossils come from marine Silurian rocks, Devonian estuaries, Carboniferous coal and amber, and even the early Eramoscorpius, once thought aquatic, proved to have book lungs. Linnaeus filed them among wingless insects before Lamarck created Arachnides in 1801.
English scorpion arrived via Old French and Latin from Greek skorpios, likely a non-Indo-European loan akin to Hebrew ʿaqrāb. The animal is thus older than its name—and still a desert icon of patience, armor, and a tail that writes danger in one curve.
Source: Scorpion
