Origin of Spiders and Their Spinning Organs Illuminated by Mid-Cretaceous Amber Fossils
View/ Open
Author
Huang, Diying
Cal, Chenyang
Su, Yitong
Yin, Zongjun
Xia, Fangyuan
Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0475-9Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Huang, Diying, Gustavo Hormiga, Chenyang Cai, Yitong Su, Zongjun Yin, Fangyuan Xia, and Gonzalo Giribet. 2018. Origin of Spiders and Their Spinning Organs Illuminated by Mid-Cretaceous Amber Fossils. Nature Ecology and Evolution 2: 623-627.Abstract
Understanding the genealogical relationships among the arachnid orders is an onerous task, but fossils have aided in anchoring some branches of the arachnid tree of life. The discovery of Palaeozoic fossils with characters found in both extant spiders and other arachnids provided evidence for a series of extinctions of what was thought to be a grade, Uraraneida, that led to modern spiders. Here, we report two extraordinarily well-preserved Mesozoic members of Uraraneida with a segmented abdomen, multi-articulate spinnerets with well-defined spigots, modified male palps, spider-like chelicerae and a uropygid-like telson. The new fossils, belonging to the species Chimerarachne yingi, were analysed phylogenetically in a large data matrix of extant and extinct arachnids under a diverse regime of analytical conditions, most of which resulted in placing Uraraneida as the sister clade of Araneae (spiders). The phylogenetic placement of this arachnid fossil extends the presence of spinnerets and modified palps more basally in the arachnid tree than was previously thought. Ecologically, the new fossil extends the record of Uraraneida 170 million years towards the present, thus showing that uraraneids and spiders co-existed for a large fraction of their evolutionary history.Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#OAPCitable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40992631
Collections
- FAS Scholarly Articles [18256]
Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)