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The idea of coming face to face with any spider unexpectedly is enough to fill any arachnophobe with horror, much less finding someone with big, pointy legs.
But that’s exactly what ran through present-day northeastern Illinois at the end of the Carboniferous Period, about 300 to 320 million years ago, according to a study published Friday in the Journal of Paleontology.
The recently discovered and extinct species is described as a “large spider-like arachnid” with “large, distinct spines on its legs” by the study authors. They were unable to place the creature within any known arachnid order due to the specimen’s lack of mouthparts, which scientists use to classify them.
“You see kind of spiny legs on some arachnids, but we’ve never seen one that actually had these big spines running the entire length, at least on the first parts of the legs. It’s very, very impressive,” Dr. Jason Dunlop, curator of arachnids and myriapods at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde and co-author of the study, told CNN on Friday.
“We looked twice and asked, ‘What are we looking at here?’”
Fossil preparation expert Bob Masek first discovered the specimen in the 1980s in the fossil deposits preserved at Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois. (The German word is a term paleontologists use to describe an exceptional site with many perfectly preserved fossils.) However, it was not until 2023 that it became apparent that the specimen was a newly discovered species and fossil collector David Douglass , who acquired it from Masek, donated it for research.
The researchers then examined and photographed the fossil using a camera attached to a microscope.
They found that the creature was “evidently something very different from any previously described arachnid,” with spiny legs reminiscent of some modern arachnids. harvestman arachnids but with a different type of body.
The creature likely used its spines for defensive purposes rather than attacking other animals, similar to a hedgehog’s spines today, Dunlop said.
“This means that if something tries to bite it, it will get stuck in the spines in its mouth. … We talk about handling time, meaning if you want to eat something thorny, it takes longer because you have to break the thorns or bite into the pieces that don’t have thorns,” he added.
“We can guess that there were scorpions and other spiders around,” Dunlop said, as well as primitive lizard-like animals or large amphibians that would have hunted these arachnids, but we can’t know for sure.
Without the mouthparts, researchers cannot identify its closest relative, but they hypothesize that it could belong to a broader group, including spiders, whip spiders and whip scorpions.
So far, paleontologists have only found this particular species in North America, but it may also “appear elsewhere” in Northern Europe, Dunlop said.
“A huge area across much of what is now Europe and North America was probably a kind of giant rainforest and wherever coal is found today, you have a reasonable chance of finding these fossils (of arachnids, plants and insects),” he added.
Ultimately, the researchers named the species Douglassarachne acanthopoda. The genus name honors the Douglass family, who donated the specimen to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the species name references the spines that make this arachnid so distinctive.
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