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    "headline": "Spiders’ silk-spinning relatives lived 380 million years ago; the oldest true spider fossils are 300 mil",
    "description": "Spiders trace back to silk-making relatives like Attercopus 380 million years ago, while true spider fossils are about 300 million years old.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-11T22:15:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "Science",
    "keywords": "Attercopus, Fossils, Spider silk, Spiders",
    "articleBody": "Spider silk is older than the dinosaurs by more than 100 million years. A spider-like animal called Attercopus fimbriunguis was already making silk in what is now upstate New York around 380 million years ago, and the oldest fossils of true spiders date to roughly 300 million years ago, in the coal swamps of the Carboniferous. That gap of about 80 million years is where the popular line “spiders have existed for at least 380 million years” gets slippery. The summary of the fossil record of spider evolution opens with that figure, but the animal behind it has since been moved out of the spider order. The silk-maker that was not quite a spider Attercopus is known from flattened scraps of cuticle in the Panther Mountain Formation of New York, according to its taxonomic entry. When first described, it was hailed as the oldest true spider and the first animal to use silk, because researchers thought they saw spinnerets and a venom-gland opening on its fangs. Later fossils from a similar Devonian site called South Mountain changed the picture. What looked like a tubular spinneret turned out to be a folded sheet of cuticle, and the venom opening was a misreading. Attercopus did make silk, but from rows of small spigots on plates under its belly, and it carried a segmented, whip-like tail. It now sits in a separate extinct order, Uraraneida. It probably wrapped eggs, laid draglines or lined burrows, and it likely never built a web. The name is a nice footnote: attercop is an old English dialect word for spider, from an Old English term meaning “poison-head.” J. R. R. Tolkien had Bilbo hurl it as an insult in The Hobbit. A timeline of spider history About 380 million years ago (Devonian): Attercopus, a silk-producing relative close to the spider line. 375 to 328 million years ago: the window in which spiders most likely split from other chelicerates, based on a 2020 molecular-clock study calibrated with 27 fossils. About 300 million years ago (Carboniferous): the oldest reported true spiders, mostly relatives of today’s Mesothelae, with spinnerets under the middle of the abdomen. More than 250 million years ago: spiders with spinnerets at the rear tip appear, the lineages that include tarantulas and most familiar house spiders. About 165 million years ago (Jurassic): Mongolarachne jurassica from Inner Mongolia, the largest known fossil spider. About 110 million years ago: an orb web preserved in amber, with a beetle, a mite, a wasp leg and a fly still stuck in it. Why the date matters Spiders are among the most successful land predators alive. More than 45,000 living species have been described, sorted into 114 families, and the true total may top 120,000. Tracing when silk first appeared shows that the material came before the web: early silk seems to have been used for protection and shelter, with snares for flying prey arriving much later as insects diversified. The record also corrects famous mistakes. Megarachne servinei, once billed as a giant spider with a 54-centimeter (1.8-foot) body, was reexamined and found to be a fairly small sea scorpion. Limits Spider bodies are soft and fossilize poorly, so the earliest chapters rest on a handful of finds. The earliest true spiders may be older than the oldest fossils, and the 2020 molecular-clock range spans nearly 50 million years. Even the Carboniferous specimens are described as “probably” belonging to the Mesothelae or something very like them. For more on tiny animals that have outlasted almost everything, see our explainer on what tardigrades can and cannot survive, and browse more fossil stories in the Badiyaa science section. Further reading Wikipedia: Evolution of spiders Wikipedia: Attercopus Image: Manukyan Andranik, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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