Study confirms horseshoe crabs are really relatives of spiders, scorpions
Blue-blooded and armored with 10 spindly legs, horseshoe crabs have perhaps always seemed a bit out of place.
Blue-blooded and armored with 10 spindly legs, horseshoe crabs have perhaps always seemed a bit out of place.
Evolution
Mar 9, 2019
4
13458
Paleontologists from the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, and their colleagues describes a 465-million-year-old trilobite with preserved gut contents in a new study. The research was published in Nature.
Ecology
Sep 27, 2023
0
3890
It may look like something out of a science fiction movie, but the horseshoe crab is definitely real. In fact it is one of natures great survivors, lasting through 3 of the Earths major extinction events.
Plants & Animals
Jan 24, 2012
0
2
Hundreds of horseshoe crabs—known as "living fossils" as they are among the earth's oldest creatures—have washed ashore dead in southern Japan, confounding experts who study the alien-like sidewalkers.
Ecology
Sep 15, 2016
18
981
Who were the earliest ancestors of scorpions, spiders and horseshoe crabs? A Ph.D. student from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), with the support of a CNRS researcher, has identified a fossil that fills the gap between ...
Evolution
May 14, 2024
0
142
An unusually well-preserved "Marine Dwarf World" from 462 million years ago was found at Castle Bank, Wales by a team led by the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS). ...
Paleontology & Fossils
May 1, 2023
1
263
Research led by University of Arizona Regents' Professor Nick Strausfeld and London Natural History Museum's Greg Edgecombe has revealed that the ancestors of chelicerates (spiders, scorpions and their kin) branched off from ...
Archaeology
Oct 16, 2013
0
0
They'd been in the collections of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) since the 1870s when they were first discovered. Nestled in among the largest collection of trilobites, the unique fossils rested in drawers ...
Evolution
Dec 24, 2023
1
55
On a bright moonlit night, a team of scientists and volunteers head out to a protected beach along the Delaware Bay to survey horseshoe crabs that spawn in their millions along the US East Coast from late spring to early ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 1, 2022
2
105
Scientists discovered the oldest known DNA and used it to reveal what life was like 2 million years ago in the northern tip of Greenland. Today, it's a barren Arctic desert, but back then it was a lush landscape of trees ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 11, 2022
1
66