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- Scientists have discovered spider-like four creatures with a tail in amber from Myanmar.
- The scientists described four specimens of the arachnid, called Chimerarachne yingi, that inhabited a Cretaceous Period tropical forest about 100 million years ago during the dinosaur age.
- The arachnid spider, a relative of modern spiders and scorpions, have many similarities with modern spiders including fangs and spinnerets, which are appendages used to spin silk but unlike its spider cousins alive today, this has a tail.
- Alongside modern spider traits such as a silk-producing structure called a spinneret, it possessed a remarkably primitive feature: a whip-like tail covered in short hairs that it may have used for sensing predators and prey.
- It was only about three-tenths of an inch long, more than half of which was its tail.
- The earliest arachnids, a group including spiders, scorpions, mites, ticks and others, dates to about 420 million years ago. The oldest-known true spiders lived about 315 millions year ago.
