The specimen will be stripped of the scientific name Mongolarachne chaoyangensis and rechristened as a crayfish. Credit: Selden et al.
Phys.org has a post about a crayfish masquerading as a spider. It seems someone painted legs on a poorly preserved crayfish fossil from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China. You can read about their detective work in a paper published in the journal Paleoentomology.
The locals sold the fossil to scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in Liaoning, China, who published a description of the fossil species in Acta Geologica Sinica, the peer-reviewed journal of the Geological Society of China. The Chinese team gave the spider the scientific name Mongolarachne chaoyangensis.
But other scientists in Beijing, upon seeing the paper, had suspicions. The spider fossil was huge and strange looking. Concerned, they contacted a U.S. colleague who specializes in ancient spider fossils: Paul Selden, distinguished professor of invertebrate paleontology in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas.
"I was obviously very skeptical," Selden said. "The paper had very few details, so my colleagues in Beijing borrowed the specimen from the people in the Southern University, and I got to look at it. Immediately, I realized there was something wrong with it—it clearly wasn't a spider. It was missing various parts, had too many segments in its six legs, and huge eyes. I puzzled and puzzled over it until my colleague in Beijing, Chungkun Shih, said, 'Well, you know, there's quite a lot of crayfish in this particular locality. Maybe it's one of those.' So, I realized what happened was I got a very badly preserved crayfish onto which someone had painted on some legs."
Selden and his colleagues at KU and in China (including the lead author of the paper originally describing the fossil) recently published an account of their detective work in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeoentomology.
