You'll never guess how many legs this millipede actually has
ABC News
No creature on Earth has more legs than a recently discovered millipede, which actually has 1,306.
This is an Inside Science story.
Millipede means "a thousand feet" in Latin. However, until now, the most legs any millipede was known to have was 750 with Illacme plenipes from California.
"This new millipede with 1,306 legs nearly doubles the number of legs of the previous record-holder," said study lead author Paul Marek, an entomologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
In 2020, evolutionary biologist Bruno Buzatto at Macquarie University in Sydney and his colleagues discovered the new record-setting millipede 60 meters underground in a 150-millimeter-wide drill hole originally bored for mineral prospecting in southwestern Australia's Goldfields region. They regularly get called in to inspect the potential impact that mining could have on any local fauna, and "over the past decade or so discovered many new invertebrate species in this fascinating underground setting," Marek said.
