A specimen of the Chimerarachne yingi, an ancient relative of spiders that had a long, whip-like tail that was probably used as a sensory organ. CreditBo Wang
The NY Times has an article about an exciting new spider-like fossil discovered in amber. Chimerarchne yingi lived during the Cretaceous Period more than 100 million years ago in what is now Southeast Asia. It's spider-like, because it's not quite a spider. It have 8 legs, fangs, and a whip like tail. It was only 2.5 millimeters long, with a tail almost twice as long as its body. The original paper appeared in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
C. yingi is not a spider, but rather a relative that lived alongside ancient spiders for millions of years. Its discovery provides insight into the evolutionary history of the creepy crawlers that have spun webs around the planet.
Similar to today’s black widows and huntsman spiders, C. yingi had silk-producing spinnerets near its rear end. The males of this species also had two modified appendages called pedipalps near their heads that were used like syringes to deliver sperm to females. But unlike today’s spiders, C. yingi had a long tail, like those seen in whip-scorpions or vinegarroons.
“Take the front of a spider, the end of a vinegarroon and then you put spinnerets on it and that’s our fossil,” said Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate biologist from Harvard University and an author on one of the papers.
“It’s like an antenna on the back end,” said Paul Selden, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas and an author of the second study.
The creature’s peculiar mix of features presented a puzzle for the teams led by Dr. Giribet and Dr. Selden. How do they classify it?
Dr. Giribet and his team suggest that C. yingi belonged to a group of extinct spider relatives called Uraraneida, which had tails. Unlike today’s spiders, uraraneids had plates on their bellies rather than squishy abdomens. They also had their silk-producing organs, or spigots, on the edges of their plates, and not on rear end spinnerets like modern spiders.
Though Dr. Selden and his colleagues agree it’s possible C. yingi may have been a part of the Uraraneida group, they also suggest that it could earn its own branch on the evolutionary tree right between spiders and Uraraneida.
Dr. Edgecombe said the two groups of researchers agreed that uraraneids were the closest relatives of spiders. But he added that the classification of whether C. yingi was more closely related to uraraneids or to modern spiders isn’t yet resolved.
