A fossilized spider found in a quarry in Germany is found to be 310 million years old after being donated to a museum
- The spider is named after Tim Wolterbeek, the man who discovered it.
- It is now described in a document as the oldest of its kind found in Germany.
At 310 million years old, it’s unlikely to come out of your drain.
But this fossilized spider still manages to look creepy after being described in a scientific paper as the oldest of its kind ever found in Germany.
It’s called arthrolycosa wolterbeeki, after Tim Wolterbeek, who dug up the ancient insect in the Piesberg quarry near Osnabrück in Lower Saxony and has now donated the fossil to the Natural History Museum in Berlin.
A study published in The Paleontological Journal by the museum’s Dr. Jason Dunlop revealed: “This spider probably had a body length of about one centimeter and a leg span of about 4 cm. It is well enough preserved to show details of the silk-producing spinnerets and even hair and claws on the legs.
The former oddball is described in a recent scientific paper as the oldest spider found in Germany.
The study has been published in the international journal Palaontologische Zeitschrift by Dr. Jason Dunlop of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
It’s called arthrolycosa wolterbeeki, after Tim Wolterbeek, who dug up the ancient insect in the Piesberg quarry near Osnabrück in Lower Saxony and has now donated the fossil to the Natural History Museum in Berlin.
The spider find comes from the Piesberg quarry near Osnabrück in Lower Saxony.
The spider find comes from the Piesberg quarry near Osnabrück in Lower Saxony.
A statement explains: ‘This spider is between 310 and 315 million years old and is named after its discoverer, Tim Wolterbeek, who kindly donated the fossil to the Berlin Museum for study.
‘This spider probably had a body length of about one centimeter and a leg span of about 4 cm. It is well enough preserved to show details of the silk-producing spinnerets and even hair and claws on the legs.
Spiders are one of nature’s great success stories, with more than 51,000 species described worldwide so far and around a thousand of them living in Germany.
This is the first paleozoic spider from Germany, the next oldest comes from the Mesozoic (Jurassic).
Although spiders are widespread and abundant today, more than 300 million years ago they do not appear to have been especially common.
The present study points out that modern mesotel spiders spend most of their lives in a burrow surrounded by silken threads that act as “tripwires.”
The statement adds: “If fossils such as Arthrolycosa wolterbeeki had a similar lifestyle, they may only have ventured out occasionally and would rarely have fallen into water where they could be preserved as fossils.”
“At the same time, the main evolutionary radiation of spiders in modern groups probably only started later in the Mesozoic, perhaps along with radiations from insects, when spiders began to build different types of webs to catch a number each increasing number of flying insects from the air”.
Spiders of this age are still extremely rare, the statement added. Only twelve Carboniferous species worldwide can be confidently identified as spiders, with earlier examples from France, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the US.
