New fossil finds seem to come out of China on a weekly basis, fostered by international collaborations between Chinese and western scientists. Most famous among the Chinese discoveries are the feathered dinosaurs and rare early mammals, but there are also significant finds of humble invertebrates.
Incredibly well preserved spiders (click on the photo for an enlarged view for details) were discovered in Mongolia from rocks 120 million years old. Even though the fossil spiders are barely 5 mm long, their exceptional preservation permits paleoarachnologists to identify them as members of a modern family of spiders that previous has only been known from the USA, Mexico, Cuba, and Costa Rica.
The discovery extends the geologic range of the family 120 million years to the Middle Jurassic, and indicates that these spiders were much more widely distributed in the past.
Photo and source: Paul Selden and Diying Huang, 2010, The oldest haplogyne spider (Araneae: Plectreuridae), from the Middle Jurassic of China. Naturwissenschaften 97:
See also: Paul Selden and David Penny, 2010. Fossil Spiders. Biological Reviews 85:171-206
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