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Related: About this forumArachnophobes take heed: this ancient spider had a whip-like tail
Source: Reuters
#SCIENCE NEWS FEBRUARY 5, 2018 / 4:26 PM / UPDATED 5 HOURS AGO
Arachnophobes take heed: this ancient spider had a whip-like tail
Will Dunham
3 MIN READ
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If you are not a fan of spiders, you may not like the creepy little arachnid scientists found entombed in chunks of amber from northern Myanmar. Unlike its spider cousins alive today, this guy had a tail.
Scientists on Monday described four specimens of the arachnid, called Chimerarachne yingi, that inhabited a Cretaceous Period tropical forest about 100 million years ago during the dinosaur age. Alongside modern spider traits such as a silk-producing structure called a spinneret, it possessed a remarkably primitive feature: a whip-like tail covered in short hairs that it may have used for sensing predators and prey.
It is a key fossil for understanding spider origins, said paleontologist Bo Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Our new fossil most likely represents the earliest branch of spiders, and implies that there was a lineage of tailed spiders that presumably originated in the Paleozoic (the geological era that ended 251 million years ago) and survived at least into the Cretaceous of Southeast Asia.
Despite its fearsome appearance, the fanged Chimerarachne was only about three-tenths of an inch (7.5 mm) long, more than half of which was its tail.
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Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-spiders/arachnophobes-take-heed-this-ancient-spider-had-a-whip-like-tail-idUSKBN1FP2P8
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Related from Nature Ecology & Evolution:
Cretaceous arachnid Chimerarachne yingi gen. et sp. nov. illuminates spider origins
Origin of spiders and their spinning organs illuminated by mid-Cretaceous amber fossils
Laffy Kat
(16,386 posts)Terrifying and fascinating. Love this kind of thing.
Anon-C
(3,430 posts)shanny
(6,709 posts)just about my least favorite critter
MFM008
(19,818 posts)Just no.
Permanut
(5,640 posts)eppur_se_muova
(36,290 posts)Articles are behind paywalls, so I don't know if the article confirms this -- the first abstract includes some cladistic analysis, but I'm not familiar with any of the clades mentioned. The second abstract is a little more readable, given what I know, and they don't identify this as a true spider, but only a close relative (the OP carefully refers to it as an "arachnid", not "spider" ). Oh, and there is a cited ref to thelyphonidae (whip scorpions). Apparently modern whip scorpions do not have spinnerets, so this seems to suggest this ancestral spider was a transitional form between whip scorpions and true spiders, as near as I can tell.
Ummmm ... just noticed ... the illustration seems show TEN legs -- apparently the "first pair" are not true legs, but pedipalps.
byronius
(7,401 posts)byronius
(7,401 posts)I don't know why that is. Shape of the head and eyes.
We have such a vanishingly small extant fossil record. Makes me wish I had a time-viewer and could just scroll back through everything that's ever lived. Wouldn't that knowledge change you? Change the way you perceive life?
Sometimes evolution is less adaptability and resilience than it is plain dumb luck.
SCantiGOP
(13,873 posts)I was running out of material for my nightmares.