An ancient, hairy, eight-legged monster—one of first animals to colonize land—may be the oldest known silk-spinning bug, says Cary Easterday, a graduate student in paleontology at Ohio State University. If true, the discovery could mean that several types of arachnids independently evolved the ability to produce silk.
All modern spiders produce silk, which has led some paleontologists to conclude that ancient spiders did as well. When and how this skill evolved is not clear, however. Spiders are thought to have evolved at least 370 million years ago, but silk-producing structures don’t turn up in the fossil record until about 290 million years ago, the age of the first known complete fossil spider. The most ancient preserved spider silk, found sealed in Lebanese amber, is even younger, just 130 to 120 million years old.
Easterday is filling in the evolution of silk-spinning through his studies of a group of spiderlike arachnids ...
