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Origin of spiders and their spinning organs illuminated by mid-Cretaceous amber fossils

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 2, pages 623–627 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Understanding the genealogical relationships among the arachnid orders is an onerous task, but fossils have aided in anchoring some branches of the arachnid tree of life. The discovery of Palaeozoic fossils with characters found in both extant spiders and other arachnids provided evidence for a series of extinctions of what was thought to be a grade, Uraraneida, that led to modern spiders. Here, we report two extraordinarily well-preserved Mesozoic members of Uraraneida with a segmented abdomen, multi-articulate spinnerets with well-defined spigots, modified male palps, spider-like chelicerae and a uropygid-like telson. The new fossils, belonging to the species Chimerarachne yingi, were analysed phylogenetically in a large data matrix of extant and extinct arachnids under a diverse regime of analytical conditions, most of which resulted in placing Uraraneida as the sister clade of Araneae (spiders). The phylogenetic placement of this arachnid fossil extends the presence of spinnerets and modified palps more basally in the arachnid tree than was previously thought. Ecologically, the new fossil extends the record of Uraraneida 170 million years towards the present, thus showing that uraraneids and spiders co-existed for a large fraction of their evolutionary history.

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Fig. 1: Light micrographs of C. yingi (NIGP167161).
Fig. 2: Micro computed tomography reconstructions of C. yingi (NIGP167161).
Fig. 3: Morphological reconstruction of male C. yingi.
Fig. 4: Phylogenetic results of the parsimony and Bayesian analyses of the morphological dataset.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support was provided by the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) (XDB18000000) and the programme Macroevolutionary Processes and Palaeoenvironments of Major Historical Biota (XDPB05) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41688103 and 91514302) and US National Science Foundation grants 1457300 (to G.H.) and 1457539 (to G.G.) (Collaborative Research: Phylogeny and diversification of the orb weaving spiders (Araneae)). We are grateful to J. Sun for reconstruction and S. Wu for micro computed tomography assistance. Published by a grant from the Wetmore Colles fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Diying Huang, Yitong Su & Zongjun Yin

  2. Department of Biological Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Gustavo Hormiga

  3. Key Laboratory of Economic Stratigraphy and Palaeogeography, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Chenyang Cai

  4. Lingpoge Amber Museum, Shanghai, China

    Fangyuan Xia

  5. Museum of Comparative Zoology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Gonzalo Giribet

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Contributions

D.H., G.G., G.H., C.C., Y.S., Z.Y. and F.X. participated in the morphological studies. D.H. coordinated the study. G.G. and G.H. conducted the phylogenetic analyses. G.G., D.H. and G.H. prepared the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Diying Huang or Gonzalo Giribet.

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Huang, D., Hormiga, G., Cai, C. et al. Origin of spiders and their spinning organs illuminated by mid-Cretaceous amber fossils. Nat Ecol Evol 2, 623–627 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0475-9

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