It feels like we’ve seen Spider-Man’s origin story more than enough for several lifetimes. But one thing Marvel has never bothered to explain is the origin of the fangs on the spider that bit Peter Parker. That job fell to a team of researchers whose findings, published in Nature, trace the evolutionary roots of spider fangs back to a 518-million-year-old sea creature.
The ancient ancestor is a small marine arthropod called Urokodia aequalis, discovered in China’s Chengjiang fossil beds. It doesn’t look anything like a spider. It looks more like a giant shrimp with eyes on stalks, and rather than possessing eight creepy legs like a modern spider, it has well over a dozen. All that stuff was visible to the naked eye, even in the fossil. X-ray tomography revealed a pair of small, pincerlike appendages rooted just behind its eyes.
Those are what the researchers claimed were the earliest known examples of chelicerae, a.k.a. the specialized mouthparts that eventually evolved into spider fangs and scorpion pincers. The fossil even preserved some soft tissue, a rarity among such ancient findings. Chelicerae can now be found in all sorts of creatures, including ticks, mites, horseshoe crabs — basically, anything with a sharp set of grabby or stabby claws.
Sometimes they evolved to inject venom; other times, just to pierce skin; sometimes to latch onto prey; or to act as a set of built-in biological utensils for handling food.
The Origin of Spider Fangs May Go Back to a Strange 518-Million-Year-Old Fossil
This discovery pushes back the known history of these doctors by about 14 million years, earlier than previous fossil evidence suggested. Researchers think Urokodia is a vital evolutionary bridge demonstrating how segmented appendages slowly transformed into specialized feeding tools
The discovery pushes the known history of these structures back about 14 million years, earlier than the previous fossil record. Researchers believe Urokodia represents a crucial evolutionary bridge, showing how simple segmented appendages gradually evolved into the highly specialized feeding tools that enabled its descendants to become one of the most successful groups of predators on Earth today.
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