An extraordinary new species of arachnid, resembling a spider with a tail, has been discovered in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma), of mid-Cretaceous age, around 100 million years ago.

The new animal resembles a spider in having fangs, male pedipalps, four walking legs and silk-producing spinnerets at its rear. However, it also bears a long flagellum or tail. No living spider has a tail [Credit: Dinghua Yang]

The finding is described in a paper appearing in Nature Ecology & Evolution by an international team including Paul Selden of the Paleontological Institute and Department of Geology at the University of Kansas and colleagues from China, Germany, Virginia and the United Kingdom.

“There’s been a lot of amber being produced from northern Myanmar and its interest stepped up about ten years ago when it was discovered this amber was mid-Cretaceous; therefore, all the insects found in it were much older than first thought,” said Selden. “It’s been coming into China where dealers have been selling to research institutions. These specimens became available last year to Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology.”

The new animal resembles a spider in having fangs, male pedipalps, four walking legs and silk-producing spinnerets at its rear. However, it also bears a long flagellum or tail. No living spider has a tail, although some relatives of spiders, the vinegaroons, do have an anal flagellum. Four new specimens have been found, and all are tiny, about 2.5 millimeters body length, excluding the nearly 3-millimeter-long tail.

“Any sort of flagelliform appendage tends to be like an antenna,” the KU researcher said. “It’s for sensing the environment. Animals that have a long whippy tail tend to have it for sensory purposes.”

The Cretaceous arachnid Chimerarachne yingi was found trapped in amber after 100 million years [Credit: University of Kansas]

This exciting new find confirms a prediction made a few years ago by Selden and colleagues when they described a similar tailed arachnid, which resembled a spider but lacked spinnerets. These animals, from the much older Devonian (about 380 million years ago) and Permian (about 290 million years ago) periods, formed the basis of a new arachnid order, the Uraraneida, which lies along the line to modern spiders.

“The ones we recognized previously were different in that they had a tail but don’t have the spinnerets,” said Selden. “That’s why the new one is really interesting, apart from the fact that it’s much younger — it seems to be an intermediate form. In our analysis, it comes out sort of in between the older one that hadn’t developed the spinneret and modern spider that has lost the tail.”

The new animal, called Chimerarachne after the Greek mythological Chimera, a hybrid creature composed of the parts of more than one animal, lies one step closer to modern spiders on account of its possession of spinning organs.

Selden said little of the tiny spider’s day-to-day behavior could be determined.

Dorsal view of entire Chimerarachne yingi specimen [Credit: University of Kansas]

“We can only speculate that, because it was trapped in amber, we assume it was living on or around tree trunks,” he said. “Amber is fossilized resin, so for a spider to have become trapped, it may well have lived under bark or in the moss at the foot of a tree.”

While the tailed spider was capable of producing silk due to its spinnerets, Selden said it was unlikely to have constructed webs to trap bugs like many modern spiders.

“We don’t know if it wove webs,” said the KU researcher. “Spinnerets are used to produce silk but for a whole host of reasons — to wrap eggs, to make burrows, to make sleeping hammocks or just to leave behind trails. If they live in burrows and leave, they leave a trail so they can find their way back. These all evolved before spiders made it up into the air and made insect traps. Spiders went up into the air when the insects went up into the air. I presume that it didn’t make webs that stretched across bushes. However, like all spiders it would have been a carnivore and would have eaten insects, I imagine.”

Selden said the spider’s remote habitat made it possible that tailed descendants may still be alive in Myanmar’s backcountry to this day.

“We know a lot about the Burmese biota during the Cretaceous,” he said. “It was a pretty good tropical rainforest, and there are a great many other arachnids we know were there, particularly spiders, that are very similar to the ones you find today in the southeast Asian rainforest. It makes us wonder if these may still be alive today. We haven’t found them, but some of these forests aren’t that well-studied, and it’s only a tiny creature.”

Source: University of Kansas [February 05, 2018]

Insects are the most diverse group of animals on earth, with more than 1 million species, and account for more than 50 percent of all living species, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Insects are divided into more than 30 insect orders, such as Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, etc.

†Caputoraptor elegans Bai, Beutel et Wipfler gen. et sp. nov. A-D. †Caputoraptor elegans: photographs of the specimens embedded in Burmese amber; E. Reconstruction of †Caputoraptor elegans in its proposed habitat based on the fossil material; F. Possible functions of the cephalo-thoracic scissors of †Caputoraptor elegans [Credit: BAI Ming]

In early 2016, a Sino-German collaborative research team discovered a new extinct insect order, †Alienoptera (Bai et al., 2016. Gondwana Research), in 99-million-year-old amber from Myanmar. The researchers report it to be a bizarre hybrid of several insect orders.

Insects use mouthparts, legs and other body parts to cling to mating partners, catch prey or defend themselves. Over 400 million years of evolution, specialized appendages evolved independently in several groups to perform these tasks. They include modified legs in mantids, assassin bugs and stick insects, and clasping antennae in globular springtails.

Until this new order was discovered, however, no known species used the neck region between the head and thorax for such functions.

The researchers describe females of the second new species from †Alienoptera, †Caputoraptor elegans, a very unusual, presumably predacious insect discovered in approximately 100 million-year-old Burmese amber based on a total of nine individuals from eight amber pieces. All specimens were scanned with μ-Ct devices at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility (BSRF), or the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF).

Based on 2-D and 3-D data covering several morphological features, researchers concluded that this species lived in the foliage of trees or bushes. The most striking morphological feature of †Caputoraptor is a jack-knife mechanism with sharp edges of the posterior head meshing with toothed ridges on the anterior prothorax.

Such a configuration is not known from any other fossil or extant species. Although the musculature involved in the mechanism was not preserved in the specimens of †Caputoraptor, it is likely that the two ridges interacted like the blades of a scissors when the head was lowered.

Since the position of the eyes suggests that the field of vision of †Caputoraptor did not include the space between the ridges, sensory hairs most likely functioned as a trigger causing the cephalo-thoracic scissors to close. It is difficult to determine how and why †Caputoraptor used this unique mechanism.

However, based on the structure of the apparatus, researchers have hypothesized that the cephalo-thoracic device was a sexual-dimorphic structure of the female, used to cling to the male during copulation. A defensive or prey-catching function appears less likely. A similar mechanism did not evolve in any other known group of extant or extinct insects.

Females mounting males are known among several groups of insects, including grasshoppers, mayflies and roaches. The spread forewings of the males would fit perfectly with the cephalo-thoracic scissors of the females. These short, sclerotized structures would not be mechanically damaged between the ridges and would provide stable anchorage. Once the female achieved such a fixed position, copulation could take place with the female on top of the male.

The results have been published in Current Biology.

Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences [January 25, 2018]

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Though no one was injured, the UFO ripped through a jade miner's tent, and afterwards, the smell of burning filled the air, according to The Myanmar Times.

A large, unidentified metal object fell from the sky yesterday (Nov. 10) in the remote mountainous region of Myanmar. The cylindrical object, which is about 12 feet (3.7 meters) long and 5 feet

Tia Ghose www.livescience.com 11-11-16

in diameter, blasted into the village of Lone Khin, near a jade mine. Villagers woke early in the morning to a loud boom and vibrations, when the object fell to the ground. Though no one was injured, the UFO ripped through a jade miner's tent, and afterwards, the smell of burning filled the air, according to The Myanmar Times.
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