500-million-year-old fossil sheds light on origins of spiders and scorpions

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]There's a fossil that sat in a museum for nearly 50 years, and until now, nobody realized what it actually was.

[00:00:07]This 500-million-year-old marine creature is brand new to science, and it's one of the oldest known relatives of spiders, scorpions, and mites.

[00:00:16]Its claws are what make it so special.

[00:00:18]There are these distinct [music] pincers jutting out of its head, a key characteristic of the group of arthropods it belongs to, known as chelicerates.

[00:00:26]Scientists knew of other examples of these claw-headed critters, but nobody had found evidence about them this far back in time, until now. One researcher spent about [music] 50 hours with a needle, carefully scraping away the rock to reveal the anatomy [music] underneath. And what they found suggests that by 500 million years ago, specialized predators were already out there, >> [music] >> grabbing and manipulating prey in ways that their contemporaries simply could not match at the time. Pretty wild for something that's been sitting in a drawer since the '70s.