What it is
A scorpion about 12 to 13 centimeters long, or five inches. Two of them were found at Chemnitz, in the old forest soil just beneath the ash, among a tangle of woody roots. They were lying where they lived, probably inside their own burrows, about eight centimeters below the ground surface of the day.
A gap in the record
More than sixty kinds of scorpion are known from the age of coal just before. From the Permian that followed, almost nothing had been found: one set of tracks in New Mexico and some leg pieces from Russia. These two are the first complete scorpion bodies from the whole Permian. The eruption that buried them is the reason they survived.
Male and female
Scorpions carry a pair of comb-like sense organs under the body, called pectines. The combs on the two fossils are built differently, and in living scorpions that is a difference between males and females. So the two Chemnitz scorpions may be a pair of the sexes.