Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Article
  • Published:

Cretaceous arachnid Chimerarachne yingi gen. et sp. nov. illuminates spider origins

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 2, pages 614–622 (2018)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Spiders (Araneae) are a hugely successful lineage with a long history. Details of their origins remain obscure, with little knowledge of their stem group and few insights into the sequence of character acquisition during spider evolution. Here, we describe Chimerarachne yingi gen. et sp. nov., a remarkable arachnid from the mid-Cretaceous (approximately 100 million years ago) Burmese amber of Myanmar, which documents a key transition stage in spider evolution. Like uraraneids, the two fossils available retain a segmented opisthosoma bearing a whip-like telson, but also preserve two traditional synapomorphies for Araneae: a male pedipalp modified for sperm transfer and well-defined spinnerets resembling those of modern mesothele spiders. This unique character combination resolves C. yingi within a clade including both Araneae and Uraraneida; however, its exact position relative to these orders is sensitive to different parameters of our phylogenetic analysis. Our new fossil most likely represents the earliest branch of the Araneae, and implies that there was a lineage of tailed spiders that presumably originated in the Palaeozoic and survived at least into the Cretaceous of Southeast Asia.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Holotype NIGP166870 of C. yingi.
Fig. 2: Paratype NIGP166871 of C. yingi.
Fig. 3: Morphological details and reconstruction.
Fig. 4: C. yingi NIGP166870 and NIGP166871.
Fig. 5: Phylogenetic relationships.
Fig. 6: Evolutionary history of spiders and spider-related arachnids.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Selden, P. A. Fossil mesothele spiders. Nature 379, 498–499 (1996).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Selden, P. A., Shcherbakov, D. E., Dunlop, J. A. & Eskov, K. Y. Arachnids from the Carboniferous of Russia and Ukraine, and the Permian of Kazakhstan. Paläont. Z. 88, 297–307 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Shear, W. A., Palmer, J. M., Coddington, J. A. & Bonamo, P. M. A Devonian spinneret: early evidence of spiders and silk use. Science 246, 479–481 (1989).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Selden, P. A., Shear, W. A. & Bonamo, P. M. A spider and other arachnids from the Devonian of New York, and reinterpretations of Devonian Araneae. Palaeontology 34, 241–281 (1991).

    Google Scholar 

  5. Selden, P. A., Shear, W. A. & Sutton, M. D. Fossil evidence for the origin of spider spinnerets, and a proposed arachnid order. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 20781–20785 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Platnick, N. I. & Gertsch, W. J. The suborders of spiders: a cladistics analysis. Am. Mus. Novit. 2607, 1–15 (1976).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Haupt, J. The Mesothelae—a monograph of an exceptional group of spiders (Araneae: Mesothelae). Zoologica 154, 1–102 (2003).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Shultz, J. W. A phylogenetic analysis of the arachnid orders based on morphological characters. Zool. J. Linn. Soc. 150, 221–265 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Savory, T. On the arachnid order Palpigradi. J. Arachnol. 2, 43–45 (1974).

    Google Scholar 

  10. Legg, D. A., Sutton, M. D. & Edgecombe, G. D. Arthropod fossil data increase congruence of morphological and molecular phylogenies. Nat. Commun. 4, 2485 (2013).

  11. Garwood, R. J. & Dunlop, J. A. Three-dimensional reconstruction and the phylogeny of extinct chelicerate orders. PeerJ 2, e641 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Garwood, R. J. et al. Almost a spider: a 305-million-year-old fossil arachnid and spider origins. Proc. R. Soc. B 283, 20160125 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Lamarck, J. B. Système des Animaux sans Vertebres (Deterville, Paris, 1801).

  14. Wunderlich, J. New and rare fossil spiders (Araneae) in mid Cretaceous amber from Myanmar (Burma), including the description of new extinct families of the suborders Mesothelae and Opisthothelae as well as notes on the taxonomy, the evolution and the biogeography of the Mesothelae. Beitr. Araneol. 10, 72–279 (2017).

    Google Scholar 

  15. Selden, P. A. & Ren, D. A review of Burmese amber arachnids. J. Arachnol. 45, 324–343 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Miether, S. T. & Dunlop, J. A. Lateral eye evolution in the arachnids. Arachnology 17, 103–119 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Wheeler, W. C. et al. The spider tree of life: phylogeny of Araneae based on target-gene analyses from an extensive taxon sampling. Cladistics 33, 574–616 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Raven, R. J. The spider infraorder Mygalomorphae (Araneae): cladistics and systematics. Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. 182, 1–180 (1985).

    Google Scholar 

  19. Kraus, O. Liphistius and the evolution of spider genitalia. Symp. Zool. Soc. Lond. 42, 235–254 (1978).

    Google Scholar 

  20. Shultz, J. W. The origin of the spinning apparatus in spiders. Biol. Rev. 62, 89–113 (1987).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Marples, B. J. The spinnerets and epiandrous glands of spiders. J. Linn. Soc. Zool. 46, 209–222 (1967).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Sharma, P. P. Chelicerates and the conquest of land: a view of arachnid origins through an evo-devo spyglass. Int. Comp. Biol. 57, 510–522 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Dunlop, J. A. & Lamsdell, J. C. Segmentation and tagmosis in Chelicerata. Arth. Struct. Dev. 46, 395–418 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. O’Reilly, J. E. et al. Bayesian methods outperform parsimony but at the expense of precision in the estimation of phylogeny from discrete morphological data. Biol. Lett. 12, 20160081 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Shi, G. H. et al. Age constraint on Burmese amber based on U–Pb dating of zircons. Cretac. Res. 37, 155–163 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Ross, A., Mellish, C., York, P. & Crighton, B. in Biodiversity of Fossils in Amber from the Major World Deposits (ed. Penney, D.) 208–235 (Siri Scientific Press, Manchester, 2010).

  27. Wang, B. et al. Debris-carrying camouflage among diverse lineages of Cretaceous insects. Sci. Adv. 2, e1501918 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Garwood, R. J., Dunlop, J. A., Knecht, B. J. & Hegna, T. A. The phylogeny of fossil whip spiders. BMC Evol. Biol. 17, 105 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to M. Engel and J. Wunderlich for helpful initial comments, Y. Huang and Y. Ying for providing specimens, Z. Yin and S. Wu for the micro-computed tomography reconstruction, J. Keating for advice on Bayesian inference of phylogeny and D. Yang for the reconstruction. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41572010, 41622201 and 41688103), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDPB05) and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (number 2011224).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Bo Wang & Xiaojie Lei

  2. Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China

    Bo Wang

  3. Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jason A. Dunlop

  4. Department of Geology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Paul A. Selden

  5. Earth Sciences Department, Natural History Museum, London, UK

    Paul A. Selden & Russell J. Garwood

  6. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Russell J. Garwood

  7. Department of Biology, Hampden–Sydney College, Hampden–Sydney, VA, USA

    William A. Shear

  8. Friedhofstraße 9, Käshofen, Germany

    Patrick Müller

  9. University of Sciences and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Xiaojie Lei

Authors
  1. Bo Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jason A. Dunlop
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Paul A. Selden
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Russell J. Garwood
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. William A. Shear
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Patrick Müller
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Xiaojie Lei
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

B.W. designed the project. B.W., J.A.D., P.A.S., R.J.G. and W.A.S. all contributed to observation and interpretation of the fossils and drafted the manuscript. B.W. and X.L. produced the photographs. P.A.S. produced the line drawings, measurements and description. R.J.G. ran the phylogenetic analysis. P.M. collected data.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bo Wang.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims inpublished maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary figures, phylogenetic reconstruction and character list

Life Sciences Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data

Executable data matrices

Supplementary Video

3D reconstruction of specimen NIGP166871

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Wang, B., Dunlop, J.A., Selden, P.A. et al. Cretaceous arachnid Chimerarachne yingi gen. et sp. nov. illuminates spider origins. Nat Ecol Evol 2, 614–622 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0449-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0449-3

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing