Can we drill a hole in there and extract some DNA and create a new one? Oh wait, this isn’t Jurassic Park.
Cretaceous amber has ponied up another spectacular find, and something rarely seen before: tiny arachnids, with mobile tails longer than their bodies. The creatures were encased in tree resin roughly 100 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous, and the discovery shows that the extraordinary family of arachnids could have roamed our planet for at least 280 million years.
Named Chimerarachne yingi, the arachnid shares a lot of features in common with modern spiders. It has eight legs, two male pedipalps, fangs, and spinnerets on the rear of its opisthosoma. What makes it confusing is that the creature also has a long flagellate tail, called a telson, measuring around 3 millimetres to the 2.5 millimetres of the arachnid’s body.
Image by University of Kansas
