Ancient arachnid brought back to life (sort of)

Researchers from The University of Manchester and Germany’s Museum fur Naturkunde used fossils from the Natural History Museum in London to work out the range of motions this early relative of the spider would have been able to make.

The creature, a trigonotarbid, are known to have lived in Eiurope and Northern America and ranged in size from a few millimetres to a few centimetres.

“When it comes to early life on land, long before our ancestors came out of the sea, these early arachnids were top dog of the food chain,” said author Dr Russell Garwood, a palaeontologist in the University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.

“They are now extinct but from about 300 to 400 million years ago seem to have been more widespread than spiders. Now we can use the tools of computer graphics to better understand and recreate how they might have moved – all from thin slivers of rock, showing the joints in their legs.”

Co-author Jason Dunlop, a curator at the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, said: “For me, what’s really exciting here is that scientists themselves can make these animations now, without needing the technical wizardry – and immense costs – of a Jurassic Park-style film.”

“When I started working on fossil arachnids we were happy if we could manage a sketch of what they used to look like; now we can view them running across our computer screens.”

This work is part of a special collection of papers on three-dimensional visualisation and analysis of fossils published in the Journal of Paleontology.