It might be hard for someone other than Dan Richards to love a scorpion, but by the end of his presentation Thursday night at the Field House of Natural History State Park Museum, more people learned to appreciate the creatures.

With their prehistoric appearance, fearsome pincers and venom-filled stinger, scorpions often get a bad rap. But for Richards, a park manager with the Utah Division of Natural Resources, the animals are a beautiful and necessary part of ecosystems ranging from Utah’s desert to the high Himalayas to rain forests a half a world away. In fact, Richards said, the only continent scorpions don’t inhabit is Antarctica, and that’s because there’s no food for them there.

“If there was something for them to eat, they’d be there,” he told the crowd of more than 50 who came to hear his presentation.

Richards said there’s no reason for people to fear scorpions attacking them for no reason. A scorpion’s first impulse when it senses danger is to leave or hide. It will only attack when it feels it’s cornered, Richards said.

“Did you ever think about it from the scorpion’s point of view?” he asked.

Although all scorpions are venomous to some extent, only a handful have a venom that could be deadly to humans, he said. In America there hasn’t been a fatality attributed to a scorpion sting since 1966.

Richards demonstrated the docility of the scorpions by picking up one to show the crowd. That particular scorpion had grown accustomed to being handled by Richards, he said, cautioning people against going out and picking up scorpions they find in the wild.

Scorpions actually do quite a lot of good for people, Richards said. As a group, the arachnids eat about 200 million pounds of bugs a year, helping control the insect population.

The animals are also amazing survivors. Richards recounted the story of one scorpion that found itself wrapped up in a plaster cast at a fossil dig, stored away for a year in a basement, and then unwrapped. It was still alive. The scorpion’s ability to convert nearly all of its food into energy and moisture lets them achieve such astonishing feats of survival, Richards said. That survivability has allowed scorpions to remain largely unchanged for most of their 430 million-year history.

The presentation was free to the public, part of a regular free lecture series hosted at the Field House.