The modern sea spider had started to diversify by the Jurassic, study finds

BYLINE: Laura Thomas

Newswise — 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.

Lead author Dr Romain Sabroux from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said: “Sea spiders (Pycnogonida), are a group of marine animals that is overall very poorly studied.

“However,…