An extremely rare collection of 160-million-year-old sea spider fossils from Southern France are closely related to living species, unlike older fossils of their kind.
These fossils are very important to understand the evolution of sea spiders. They show that the diversity of sea spiders that still exist today had already started to form by the Jurassic.
Unlike older sea spider fossils, the La Voulte pycnogonids are morphologically similar to living species, and previous studies suggested they could be closely related to living sea spider families. But these hypotheses were restricted by the limitation of their observation means. As it was impossible to access what was hidden in the rock fossils, Dr. Sabroux and his team traveled to Paris and set out to investigate this question with cutting-edge approaches.
This confirmed that these fossils are close relatives to surviving pycnogonids. Two of these fossils belong to two living pycnogonid families: Colossopantopodus boissinensis was a Colossendeidae while another, Palaeoendeis elmii was an Endeidae. The third species, Palaeopycnogonides gracilis, seems to belong to a family that has disappeared today.
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