Spiders are just so... alien The marine ancestors of arachnids (spiders, scorpions and mites) are even more alien looking...
The biggest fossils known are more than six feet in length. This makes the Eurypterids or "sea scorpions" the largest arthropods that ever existed, so far as is known.
I think the closest living marine relative of the spiders would be another odd looking creature; the horseshoe crab.
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Spiders are just so... alien"
Man, you have no idea. I lived in Colombia for a year and I saw several spiders of whom I said exactly that,
they must be from another planet. Forget your poisonous snakes, you can usually see those things -- and for the record there were no poisonous snakes where I lived in Colombia -- but spiders, uggghhhhhh! You could be right on top of one, or worse one could be right on top of you, without ever knowing it.
Did you ever hear of a spider that
eats birds? Think I'm kidding don't you? I'm not. This one is called the "
Goliath Tarantula" or the "Goliath Bird Eating Spider" or
Theraphosa Blondi. Colombia is not their true home, and the only online source I have found giving information on this beast does not list Colombia as its natural range (Venezuela, Brazil, the Guianas), but I assure you they exist in Colombia -- by my own eyes -- where they are called
Polleros, because they seem to thrive on little chicken hatchlings (
Pollitos), whose tissue they dissolve with their venom, after which they suck it out. There is even film, as you can read about at the above link, of one of these eating a deadly venomous Fer-de-Lance snake --
how's that for bad?
They can grow to twelve inches across from leg tip to leg tip:
Alien indeed!
