"It must have lived for about 200 million years side-by-side with spiders, but we've never found a fossil of one of these [before] that's younger than 295 million years", said Dr Garwood, from Manchester's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Amber is fossilized tree resin and is known for perfectly preserving many ancient fossils of insects and plants. With its curious mix of ancient and modern traits - a long, skinny tail inherited from a distant arachnid ancestor, but a silk-producing organ like those found in spiders today - the tiny chimerarachne, or "chimera spider", is not a member of the immediate family.
Scientists have discovered the fossilised remains of a previously unknown species of arachnid boasting a scorpion-like tail even longer than its body. The animal itself is only two and a half millimeters long, with its tail reaching three millimeters.
At 3mm, the tail extends beyond the newly christened Chimerarachne yingi's 2.5mm body and the worldwide scientists behind its discovery say it links today's spiders with those that lived before dinosaurs. "It was a pretty good tropical rainforest, and there are a great many other arachnids we know were there, particularly spiders, that are very similar to the ones you find today in the southeast Asian rainforest". No modern spider has a similar feature.
Spider-like arachnid with a tail sheds new light on origin of spiders
This is then offered for sale to various institutions, with the new species - dating back to the mid-Cretaceous period - coming to light when specimens were made available to the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology. Researchers do not entirely agree on how the creepy crawly should be classified, however.
"Silk-spinning spiders with and without tails co-existed for millennia, the authors agree". This means that the Chimerarachne Yingi spiders lived alongside large herbivores like the Iguanodon and hadrosaurs, and even larger predators like the Tyrannosaurus rex.
From what they can see, it looks like a spider with a tail from another creature attached to it.
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Explaining the tail, Selden says: "Any sort of flagelliform appendage tends to be like an antenna".
They published their findings this week in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, suggesting the species is part of a lineage of tailed spiders.
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The Cretaceous-era critter has been dubbed Chimerarachne yingi, borrowing its name from the Chimera, a mythological creature composed of the parts of several different animals.
"Chimerarachne could be considered as a spider".
The fossils are now so well preserved that, one can easily observe the head, fangs, male pedipalps, their legs and spinner rest at their back. Fleur reports for the New York Times, the newly discovered arachnid has at least one feature that sets it apart from any living spider: a tail.
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A dorsal view of an entire Chimerarachne yingi specimen. Some argue that spinnerets were the key innovation that allowed spiders to become so successful; there are almost 50,000 known spider species alive today.