Jurassic Arachnophobia (ca. 160,000,000 BC)
In the summer of 2007, a collection of ancient sea spiders was discovered in French fossil beds around La Voulte-sur-Rhone, which has previously yielded other examples of ancient sea creatures. This trove of ancient spiders, however, now fills in a 400-million-year gap in their fossil record.
The scientific term for the sea spiders is ‘pycnogonids’, and they were found during routine work in the area. The fossils were extremely well-preserved, and the specimens are described in detail inside of a paper published online through The Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The paper talks about 70 the specimens of ancient sea spiders, divided into 3 distinct species, all uncovered in the area’s Lagerstatte, which is a type of sedimentary rock formation. During the Jurassic period – which lasted from 199.6 to 145.5 million years ago – this Lagerstatte was actually covered by water that was 200 meters deep!
Although there are plenty of modern sea spiders, their relationship to the mysterious ancient creatures has remained mostly speculative. Researchers are hoping that this large cache of fossils will help to piece together the creatures’ evolutionary history, especially considering the very distant relationship between sea spiders and “true” spiders.
The current vein of thought is that the ancient pycnogodis appear to be remarkably similar to today’s living sea spiders, even though they likely began colonizing very deep parts of the sea well before the start of the Jurassic period.
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