It is possible to make spiders creepier, ancient fossils in amber show
About 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, four, tiny spider-like creatures became trapped in amber. Today, scientists announced they belong to an entirely new species. But experts disagree about how these fossils relate to modern-day spiders, because there’s something strange about their crumpled corpses: all four of them have tails.
The fossils, described today in two different studies in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, look like spiders. But no living spiders have tails. That’s why one of today’s studies argues that this new species is a member of an extinct group of primitive spider relatives called uraraneids — which did have tails. The other claims that this new species may instead represent a very early...