Researcher Russell Garwood used computed tomography and found a new fossil in France which is almost like a spider, but not exactly one, as per a report dated March 30, 2016.
This oldest known spider fossil was 305 million old and comes from Montreal-Les-Mines, an Eastern France’s coal seam.
This almost spider is dubbed ‘Idmonarachne brasieri’ and lacks those spinnerets that spiders use for turning silk into webs.
Arachnids have murky origins and were the first creatures who adopted the terrestrial life almost 420 million years back.
Since there were very few rocks laid down that time, not much history about this arachnids is preserved. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out the evolutionary relationship from DNA since arachnids diversified quite early and left few traceable evolutionary changes in genes.
The fossil also reveals that the spiders lived along with not-quite-spider cousins. With computed tomography, Garwood, as well as his colleagues, could peer inside the rock at the mouthparts and walk legs of the arachnid.
It turned out to have legs and mouthparts like a spider, although it lacked spinnerets. Instead of a fused abdomen, it had a segmented abdomen.
Members of an earlier branch of arachnid termed Uraraneida were also spiderlike in appearance but had a tail-like long structure termed ‘flagellum’.
It didn’t have spinnerets but had structures termed spigots having excreted silk. As a result, researchers suspect of I brassiere having produced silk too without spectacular weaving abilities.
Now, the researchers have plans of examining other fossils as well for getting a better understanding of spiders. Not much is known about how spiders and arachnids like harvestmen or scorpions fit in a family tree together. Garwood stated that as a whole, arachnids are an incredibly successful group.
