NEW HAVEN, Conn., Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Volcanic ash that encased
and preserved sea life 425 million years ago has yielded fossils of
an ancient sea spider.SAVE MONEY ON TRAVEL DEALS
Researchers at Yale, which took part in a joint study with
British researchers, identify the spider as a pycnogonid, one of the
most unusual types of arthropod in the seas today.
Sea spiders are soft-bodied arthropods, found widely in
modern oceans. For two centuries there has been a controversy about
the relationship of sea spiders to land spiders, scorpions, ticks
and mites because of their unique body form.
The research was carried out as part of a project on the
Herefordshire fauna by a team made up of Derek Siveter and Mark
Sutton at Oxford, Derek Briggs at Yale and David Siveter at
Leicester.
The group has made a number of other spectacular finds of
soft-bodied organisms in the same deposit including crustaceans, a
worm-like mollusk, a polychaete worm and a starfish.
