A spider fossil from northeastern China is so exquisitely preserved that it reads like a field notebook from deep time, capturing delicate anatomy that usually vanishes long before rock hardens. I see ...

A new analysis of an exquisitely preserved fossil that lived half a billion years ago suggests that arachnids—spiders and their close kin—evolved in the ocean, challenging the widely held belief that ...

The special brains of spiders may have started to evolve in the oceans, long before their ancestors crawled onto land. A fresh look at a 500-million-year-old fossil by researchers from the University ...

Half a billion years ago, a strange sea-dwelling creature called Mollisonia symmetrica may have paved the way for modern spiders. Using detailed fossil brain analysis, researchers uncovered neural ...

If you thought Australia’s spiders were scary, wait until you see the prehistoric version, because everyone online is losing their minds over it. Scientists have found a fossilised giant trapdoor ...

Introduction. Caught in the act ; What are spiders and how do they fit into the grand scheme of things? ; Spiders in the fossil record ; Age, radiations and extinction events ; What is the importance ...

Whether you love spiders or can't be within 10 feet of them, you probably think of them crawling around on land. And based on the fossil record, most researchers would probably say the same thing. For ...