Not quite a spider, not a scorpion either – where does Douglassarachne acanthopoda fit in?

Douglassarachne acanthopoda was a more experimental version of a modern harvestman, with distinctive armored legs.

This leggy, spiny fella is Douglassarachne acanthopoda, whom we’ll call Doug for short (only kidding). You might look at this fossilized specimen and confidently declare, “That there’s a spider.” But wait! While D. acanthopoda certainly shares many of the characteristics of modern arachnids, it has enough unique features to give palaentologists a headache when it comes to classifying it.

Spiders and their ancestors have been around on this planet for about the last 400 million years. If you were thrust back in time to the Carboniferous and landed in the coal forests of North America or Europe, you’d probably see some critters you’d recognize as spiders, harvestmen, or scorpions. But even among that pack, D. acanthopoda would have stood out.

“Douglassarachne acanthopoda comes from the famous Mazon Creek locality in Illinois and is about 308 million years old,” said Paul Selden, lead author of a new study on this enigmatic fossil, in a statement. “This compact arachnid had a body length of about 1.5 centimeters [0.6 inches] and is characterized by its remarkably robust and spiny legs – such that it is quite unlike any other arachnid known, living or extinct.”

So unlike, in fact, that Selden and co-author Jason Dunlop were forced to conclude that it simply doesn’t fit into any of our known orders of arachnids.

“The fossil’s very spiny legs are reminiscent of some modern harvestmen, but its body plan is quite different from a harvestman or any other known arachnid group,” Dunlop explained.

This reconstruction shows how the 308-million-year-old may have looked in its heyday. Image credit: Paul Selden et al.

Being over 300 million years old, it’s understandable that the fossil is missing a few details, like clear mouthparts, which could help narrow down an appropriate classification. This period of our planet’s history is thought to have been the first when most living groups of arachnids roamed around together, and the Mazon Creek location – where D. acanthopoda was found in the 1980s – is one of our most important portals to this time.

“Whatever its evolutionary affinities, these spiny arachnids appear to come from a time when arachnids were experimenting with a range of different body plans,” Selden said. “Some of these later became extinct, perhaps during the so-called ‘Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse,’ a time shortly after the age of Mazon Creek when the coal forests began to fragment and die off. Or perhaps these strange arachnids clung on until the end Permian mass extinction?”

The fossil spent some years on display in the Prehistoric Life Museum as part of the David and Sandra Douglass Collection. And although this particular critter is proving tricky to classify, it did still need a scientific name.

“The genus name Douglassarachne acknowledges the Douglass family, who kindly donated the specimen to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for scientific study once it became apparent that it represented an undescribed species. Then, acanthopoda refers to the unique and characteristic spiny legs of the animal,” said Dunlop.

In some places on our planet today, you almost feel that you can’t escape from spiders, no matter how hard you try (paging Australia). New species, and some we thought we’d lost, are popping up all over the shop.

But back in the day, Dunlop explains, “Spiders were a rather rare group.” Their ancestors would have shared the world stage with many impressive beasties that have long since been lost to us, with fossils our only chance now to discover their many-legged diversity.

And for Dunlop, “Douglassarachne acanthopoda is a particularly impressive example of one of these extinct forms.”

One problem is that the people who tell us that our planet is 4B years old are the same people who tell us that dinosaurs died out 65M years ago as if the soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains since 06 were just someone's imagination...

Evolution: Categories of Disproof

A proof or disproof is a kind of a transaction. There is no such thing as absolutely proving or disproving something; there is only such a thing as proving or disproving something to SOMEBODY'S satisfaction. If the party of the second part is too thick or too ideologically committed to some other way of viewing reality, then the best proof in the world will fall flat and fail.

In the case of evolution, what you have is a theory which has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved over a period of many decades now via a number of independent lines reasoning and yet the adherents go on with it as if nothing had happened and, in fact, demand that the doctrine be taught in public schools at public expense and that no other theory of origins even ever be mentioned in public schools, and attempt to enforce all of that via political power plays and lawsuits.

At that point, it is clear enough that no disproof or combination of disproofs would ever suffice, that the doctrine is in fact unfalsifiable and that Carl popper's criteria for a pseudoscience is in fact met.

The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.

The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:

The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.
The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)
The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)
The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.
The question of irreducible complexity.
The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.
The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.
The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).
The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.
The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...
The question of genetic entropy.
The obvious evidence of design in nature.
The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.

Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

I ask you: What could be stupider than that?

Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.

Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal.

There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.

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