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Fossilized spider found in quarry in Germany turns out to be 310 million years old after donated to museum
- The spider is named after Tim Wolterbeek, the man who discovered it
- It is now described in a newspaper as the oldest of its kind to be found in Germany
At 310 million years old, it’s unlikely to crawl out of your drain hole.
But this fossilized spider still looks creepy after being described in a scientific paper as the oldest of its kind ever found in Germany.
It’s called arthrolycosa wolterbeeki – named after Tim Wolterbeek, who excavated the ancient beetle in the Piesberg quarry near Osnabrück in Lower Saxony – and has now donated the fossil to Berlin’s Museum of Natural History.
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 wingspan of about 4 cm. It has been preserved well enough to show details of the silk-producing spinnerets and even hairs and claws on the legs.’
The ancient creepy crawly is described in a recent scientific paper as the oldest spider found in Germany.
The study is published in the international journal Palaontologische Zeitschrift by Dr. Jason Dunlop of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
It is called arthrolycosa wolterbeeki – named after Tim Wolterbeek, who excavated the ancient beetle in the Piesberg quarry near Osnabrück in Lower Saxony – and has now donated the fossil to the Museum of Natural History 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 release 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 wingspan of about 4 cm. It has been preserved well enough to show details of the silk-producing spinnerets and even hairs and claws on the legs.’
Spiders are one of nature’s great success stories, with more than 51,000 species described to date worldwide, of which about a thousand live in Germany.
This is the first Paleozoic spider from Germany, the next oldest from the Mesozoic Era (Jurassic).
While spiders are widespread and abundant today, they don’t seem to be particularly common over 300 million years ago.
The current study notes that modern mesothelial spiders spend most of their lives in a burrow surrounded by silken threads that act as “tripwires.”
The release adds: ‘If fossils like Arthrolycosa wolterbeeki had a similar lifestyle, they might have ventured only occasionally and rarely fallen into water where they can be preserved as fossils.
“At the same time, the great evolutionary emanation from spiders to the modern groups probably only started later in the Mesozoic Era, perhaps alongside insect radiation, when spiders began to build different types of webs to catch more and more flying insects from the air.”
Spiders of this age are still extremely rare, the release adds. Worldwide, only twelve Carboniferous species can be confidently identified as spiders, with earlier examples from France, the Czech Republic, Poland and the US.