Scenes of a Giant Extinct Sea Scorpion found in Australia? Find Out the Truth…

Claims related to discovery of species which are said to have been extinct often garner a lot of interest among many nature lovers. However, there are many misleading social media posts also, related to such rare findings. This is our investigation on such a claim related to a giant sea scorpion, said to have been extinct millions of years ago.

Social Media Claims

Claims of rare discovery of a giant extinct sea scorpion, which could grow up to 2 meters in length, was shared by social media users as seen below

Facebook | Archived

Here is another narration of this unbelievable claim.

Facebook | Archived

Can a species said to have been extinct millions of years ago, survive this long? We decided to do an investigation on this bizarre claim.

Fact Check

We did a reverse image search and were able to find that the photos were taken from a documentary series of BBC. The clip of the film was published in 2010 in a BBC website, named as the “Ancient Sea Scorpion”.

It reveals that the video is a graphic recreation about the formidable claw action of a grotesque aquatic predator. So, it's clear that the images viral on social media are not depicting a real scorpion and only a graphic recreation of a unique species from prehistoric age.

BBC | Archived

The video is an episode of the documentary, “Sea Monsters”: a part of documentary series “Walking with Dinosaurs”. Nigel Marven was the presenter of this award winning “Sea Monsters” TV series while Karen Hayley was the narrator.

British Wildlife presenter Nigel Marven was acting as a time travelling zoologist in Sea Monsters documentary series in which he tries to recreate scenes of the most dangerous seas filled with ancient sea predators. The giant sea scorpion was one of the few such species that were created from computer generated imagery and animatronics.

The production of the documentary took around 7 months and the locations were mainly around the oceans near to New Zealand and Egypt's red sea. Marven's enthusiasm over oceans and experience of swimming with large sharks was one of the reasons that he was selected as a presenter by Jasper James, the director of “Sea Monsters” documentary. More details about this can be taken from here. Archived.

The Sea Monsters was created by production team Impossible Pictures while the animatronics for sea animals were created by Crawley Creatures and Visual Effects were done by Framestore.

The “Sea Monsters” documentary was created in 2003 and production team Impossible Pictures produced in cooperation with BBC. This is how Impossible Pictures talked about the “Sea Monsters” series.

Impossible Pictures

How to create animatronics of ancient animals ? Below is a video explaining the basics of unique, life-like creations.

In the "Sea Monsters" documentary, scorpions were only one type of animal that were recreated and other species of which features can be seen below.

BBC | Archived

We searched about the findings about the scorpions in Australia and were able to find out that a fossil of the largest scorpion was found in Australia and had been placed in the Queensland Museum since 2013. However, the researchers closely looked at that ancient scorpion fossil during COVID19 locked down period and identified it as a fossil of large predator scorpion and the scorpion could be a mammoth animal(order Eurypterida).

BBC | Archived

We were able to find out that giant sea scorpions are now limited to fossils from the ancient era and not living species. Many details about the ancient sea scorpions and their fossils can be taken from here.Archived.

These large sea scorpions finally lived 251.9 million years ago . More details about this can be taken from here.

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Conclusion:

According to our investigation, we were able to find out that the viral social media photos do not depict a real large extinct scorpion. The images were captured from the BBC documentary “Sea Monsters” aired in 2010, and is only an animatronic model used to recreate scenes of how a giant sea scorpion would have looked like in prehistoric age.