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FOSSIL ARACHNIDAE,
SPIDERS & SCORPIONS.

A Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Warwickshire
Naturalists' and Archaeologists' Field Club, held at the
Museum, Warwick, on Tuesday, March 14th, 1882,

BY THE
REV. P. B. BRODIE, M.A., F.&.S..

VICAR OF ROWINGTON RURAL DEAN.

WARWICK:
PERRY, PRINTER, NEW STREET AND OLD SQUARE.

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ON FOSSIL ARACHNIDAE,
Including Spiders and Scorpions.

Some people have a great aversion to spiders, almost as much as they have to snakes; the housemaid ruthlessly sweeps away their happy homes, the cobwebs, made on purpose to catch real tormentors in hot weather, flies; ladies are apt to scream if a fine big black spider, with long hairy legs, is making its way at a rattling pace across the floor, and still worse if crawling upon a dress. All spiders secrete a poisonous fluid, which is more or less fatal to insects, but not injurious to human life (not of course including the scorpions, which are all more or less dangerous), the Tarantula and the Galeodes being perhaps the most venomous. They have a perforated curved claw, something like a poison fang, and used for a similar purpose, and this fluid, which helps to kill its prey, may in some extreme cases, cause severe inflammation; it inflicts a painful wound like a wasp's sting upon man. There is one formidable fellow, the Crab spider (Mygale cancerides), of Surinam, which, when it cannot obtain sufficient quantity of ants, on which it feeds, will, at night, rob the birds' nests and eat the young. These Mygalidoe have powerful mandibles and sharp claws, which strike their prey as a lion does with his curved talons. The Arachnidae are all more or less predaceous and carnivorous, living chiefly upon flies, which in hot countries, and even in this temperate part of the world, are sometimes a very great pest, and therefore we may

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hail them as our friends rather than treat them as enemies, in fact like all animals they have important and special functions allotted to them, which tend to equalize and keep down a number of troublesome creatures which would otherwise swarm in countless thousands. They take the place of carnivorous animals among the predatores, both in the mammals, birds, fishes, and reptiles, and so serve a very useful and important part in the animal economy. Nearly all of them spin beautiful nets to ensnare their prey; some live in the ground, others in the water.* They are very pugnacious, and some of the female spiders, larger than the males, will, it is said, when irritated, eat their husbands. If female spiders use their husbands badly, they have other redeeming features, as they are said to be attracted by music, and are also remarkable for their parental affections, protecting their young from danger to the very last. The scorpions are much larger than spiders, and therefore more formidable, and their sting is very venomous, about equal, perhaps, to that of a viper. The ancient  scorpions do not seem to have been much, if at all, larger than the recent ones; but the false scorpion from the Coal Measures (in the drawing), is bigger than the living Phrynus. Now it might be thought that the soft bodies of spiders, and their mostly terrestrial habits, would prevent them from being preserved in a fossil state, and they are. 

*A gigantic sea spider (Pycnogonid), having eight very long legs at the side, and four shorter and more slender ones behind, with a very peculiar body, is figured in the voyage of the Vega, having been caught in the dredge in the icy sea of North Siberia ('* Nordenskold's Voyage," vol l., page 349).- No further description is given except a remark upon the abundance of animal life in such extremely cold water, at great depth, and for so long a period in darkness.

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undoubtedly very rare, and indeed it is only within the last few years that any have been found. If abundant, they could hardly have escaped detection, as a very large number and variety of fossil insects, on which they prey, have been discovered in several formations both in Europe and America, the Purbecks and Lias in this country having yielded the greatest quantity, and many of these are quite as fragile and easily injured as spiders; but it is a fact that as yet none have been recorded from the Purbecks (Wealden), and only one, which is somewhat doubtful, in my collection, from the Lias, which Mr. Scudder thought resembled an aquatic American Arachnid. Indeed, I have felt surprise at the almost total absence of this class among the multitudes of insect remains which I have at various times and in diverse places discovered; some day of course they may turn up, but they will never be in great abundance, only here and there a stray specimen. Their mode of life, habits, and absence of wings, may well account for their comparative rarity ; but the presence of numerous insects in  strata of various ages thoroughout the world, even if no Archnidae had been detected, would have fairly led to the inference that they existed on the land contemporaneously with them. A sufficient number are now known fossil to prove the correctness of this, so that both spiders and scorpions were no doubt largely represented in ancient geological periods, from the Palaeozoic, up to and including the later Tertiaries ; but a great many of course have never been entombed in the rocks, so that, as in other instances, we only get a scanty record of the number of animals and plants inhabiting the ancient world at diverse epochs.
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The Tertiary formations have at present yielded the largest number, 230 species of Arachnids having been described, but of these only 190 are true spiders, the others being mites and other allied forms. The greater part of these are preserved in amber, a kind of resinous fossil gum, of Eocene age, found chiefly in the Baltic and a few other places. From the beautiful nature of this gum, and the way in which the insects and spiders were embedded in it, they are generally in a most perfect state of preservation, more or less uninjured, and therefore easily determined, which is by no means so in other cases, whether in the newer or older deposits, which contain remains of Annulosae. But there is one remarkable exception to this, in a fine and entire specimen, which I have seen, of a spider, preserved in the shale of the coal formation, in upper Silesia, and was exhibited by Professor Romer at the meeting of the British Association in Birmingham, in 1863. It shews the four pairs of feet with all their segments, the two palpi, and even the coriaceous integument of the body and the hairs attached to the feet. It resembles the recent genus Lycosa, or wolf-spider. The body, which is of a dark colour, stands out in relief on a greyish-white shale, and it is altogether a most wonderful specimen. It has been named and described by Römer Protolycosa anthracophila. It is in our earlier and later Tertiary deposits that we have the greater proportion of Araneides; the chief localities in Europe in which these are met with are the Miocene beds of Rott, in Germany, and Œningen, near the lake of Constance, in the Eocene marls at Aix, in Provence, all of which have been long known for their

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large and varied collections of fossil insects, in a fine state of preservation. Within the last few years the remains of insects, long looked for in British Tertiary deposits, have at last turned up at one particular spot near Cowes, in the Bembridge limestone of Eocene age, and among them a few spiders, which have not yet been described. In the very rich insect-bearing Tertiary strata in America, the richest in the world for the number and preservation of the fossil insects, all of which are now being figured and described by the distinguished Palaeontological entomologist, Mr. Scudder, thirteen genera and thirty species of Arachnidae have been determined, chiefly from Florisant, in Colorado, in strata probably of Eocene or Miocene age. Nearly the same families are represented in the strata of Europe and America. The groups, as a whole, vary in their proportion and numbers, between the two countries. Seventy-one genera are now known from Tertiary deposits, sixty six from Europe and thirteen from America, eight being common to both; of these thirty-seven are extinct, thirty-five in the former and two in the latter, none of these having been found, according to Mr. Scudder, in both countries. The amber contains the larger number of genera in Europe, viz., fifty-two, of which thirty-two are extinct and are confined to amber, which also contains other genera in common with other formations, older or of similar date in which Arachnids occur. It seems that the American strata have yielded some new genera, and several species; as a whole they have few points in common with those in the Prussian amber. Mr. Scudder mentions no less than seventy specimens and thirty species of Araneae, and they belong mostly to the highest

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groups. These are all from the rich locality of Florisant, in Colorado. No true spiders have as yet been detected in the secondary rocks in Great Britain.  About four species of Arachnids are recorded from the European Oolites, though only one is referable to the Araneidae, chiefly from the upper division, in lhe fine grained lithographic limestones of Solenhofen, Aichstadt, and Pappenheim in Bavaria, famous for the number and beauty of the fossils which they contain, including numerous insects, fish, crustacea, pterodactyles, and the remarkable reptilian bird Archaeopteryx. This is, I believe, the only locality where any Araneidae have as yet been recorded anywhere in strata of this period.* Thus in point of time, the ages which must have elapsed between the Oolitic on the one hand, and the Tertiary period Oil the oilier, and between the former and the Palaeozoic, where Arachnids have been discovered, were of enormous extent, and as yet no trace of this class has been met with, even where insects, which form their prey, are known to occur in considerable abundance and variety, as in the Purbecks (Wealden), and Lias before referred to.  That they existed there can be no reasonable doubt, as they would be the carnivorous creatures appointed to keep in check the otherwise super-abundance of insect life, and the fact of their presence in the older Carboniferous rocks in the middle Oolitic period, and again later on in the Tertiary, would offer a reasonable assumption of their existence on the land

* In the splendid collection of fosses in the South Kensington (Natural History) Museum, among other treasures are several small long legged spiders (apparently), from the Solenhofen (Oolitic) slate; but I am not sure whether they all belong to the same genus or are Araneides.

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with insects, only that the circumstances were not favourable for their fossilization. As relics of insects, chiefly elytra of Coleoptera, occur in the sandy and marly beds which contain an abundance of dicotyledonous leaves, ferns, and other plants in the Cretaceous series at Aix-la-Chapelle, in France, the presence of Arachnidae may be fairly looked for and inferred, though they have not yet been recorded. The same may be said both of the Trias and  Permian in  Europe and  America, where very few and rare traces of insects are known, and even in the Devonian rocks in America, the oldest formation in which any insects have been found. From time to time, though very rarely, in strata of Carboniferous age, belonging to the coal series in the shales and ironstone, a few Arachnids have been discovered. These belong to about a dozen species, most of which have been considered to be scorpions, and only three of these are spiders. These occur both in British and foreign Coal Measures; but as these contain, both in Europe and America, a considerable number of remain of insects, we: may expect more to be brought to light hereafter.* Considering the enormous amount of excavations in these rocks, great opportunities are offered to the Palaeontologist, and if the different coal fields were more frequently and diligently searched, a much larger quantity of organisms would be found, and our knowledge of the Palaeozoic fauna and flora greatly extended. No finer or more perfect specimen of a fossil spider has been found than the one already recorded, from Silesia,

*The French Coalfields are yielding a large and abundant supply of numerous and varied forms of fossil insects, and when M. Charles Brongniart describes them, some spiders and scorpions may be expected to be discovered among them. M. Brongniart informs me that he has more than 100 specimens to examine from Commentry~

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and I am not aware whether, besides this, any of the others have yet been figured or described, though no doubt Mr. Scudder will undertake this for the American examples.  One species of Aranea from coal beds of Bohemia, is also known, but it does not appear that any true spider has been discovered in Great Britian, but where there are scorpions and insects, we may certainly expect to meet with them, though they will, for reasons stated, be always scarce, and the fact that as yet only three are known proves this. Scorpions, which may be considered to be the fathers of spiders, being as we have seen much larger, and more formidable creatures, have been discovered here and there, though rarely, in Europe arid America, in the coal measures. About nine species are known, and have been described by Dr. Woodward, Scudder, and other Palaeontologists. One of the earliest, though very imperfect, Eophryinis Prestvicii (Woodward), was figured in Buckland's " Bridgewater Treatise," as an insect, and another splendid specimen-of the same genus, many years afterwards, from the Staffordshire Coal-field, by Woodward, a print of which I now lay before you. He describes it as an interesting type of false scorpions, and comes nearest to the recent Phrynus. The eight legs and two palpi are preserved, and the clay ironstone nodule in which it is contained exhibits on one side the upper or dorsal surface, and on the other the under or ventral aspect.  The base of the abdomen has four short spines. It appears then that at present two false scorpions, viz., Architarbus rotundatus, Scudder, coal measures, Illinois, America, and two specimens of Eophrynus Prestvicii, from the same formation, at Coalbroke Dale

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and Dudley, and the following Scorpionidae are recorded by Dr. Woodward, in his paper in the " Geological Magazine," (vol. viii., No 9, September, 1871.)
1.	Microlabis sternbergi, Corda, Coal Measures, Bohemia
2.	Cyclopthalmus senior, Corda,	ditto		ditto
3.	Mazonia Woodiana, M. & W.		ditto	          Illinois
4.	Eoscorpius carbonarius, M. & W.	ditto		ditto

Three others, making the total of nine, are referred to by Scudder, but where described, if at all, I am not able to state. Since then no other fossils of this class have been detected until the latter part of last year, when the Scotch Geological Survey collectors came upon a stratum of Carboniferous shale, on the banks of the river Esk, full of the remains of fishes, crustacea, and Arachnids in excellent preservation, so much so that structures not previously retained in a fossil state, have been recognized, and many of these are entirely new. Among these several unusually perfect specimens of Scorpions have been met with, which have been examined by Mr. Peach, of the Geological Survey, and will shortly be fully described by him.* They differ in no essential respect from the living scorpion as far as regards external organs. Even the hairs and hooks on the feet are preserved, and though the sting has not been found its presence is proved by the discovery of the poison gland. The mandibles, palpi, and eight legs, are beautifully distinct in many specimens.  The combs are much like those of the modern scorpion, with a remarkable sculpturing, which recalls that of some of the Crustacea, viz., Eurypteridae. Mr. Peach informs me that it is the flattened integument 

* Since this Paper was read, Mr. Peach's valuable Paper, with two Plates and full description of four new species of Carboniferous Scorpions, has been published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 30) p. 22, 1883.

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itself which is preserved, it still retains the brown colour, and is quite flexible and readily comes off. Detached fragments of Scorpionidae, are not, it seems, unfrequent in the Carboniferous series of Scotland, and they occur in areas wide apart, ranging- from the Calciferous sandstone (the equivalent of the lower part of the English Carboniferous limestone), to the coal measures.  At last a particular locality, so often the case, has been hit upon where they evidently occur in unusual abundance, though only a few exhibit all the details of structure above named, and it requires the examination of several specimens to make out so much. Some favourable spot is now and then accidentally discovered where an unusual abundance and variety of fossils are imbedded. Thus we are enabled to fill up some gaps in the geological story, though many still remain to be opened up, so that we shall probably never entirely obtain a full record of the past. The failure in finding any number of fossil spiders may be after all, the exception, not the rule. It may depend in a great degree upon what is called chance, and the casual discovery of some place, rich in peculiar fossils, may, as Lyell observes, modify, and to a great extent overthrow our previous generalisations. The chief difference between the recent and fossil scorpion, lies in the fact that in the latter the mesial eyes are much larger in proportion to the lateral ones, and also to the size of the whole animal.* Thus it appears that the scorpion is the most ancient type of Arachnid, and in the Palaeozoic rocks is more abundant, though still comparatively rare, than the Araneidae, true spiders;  the latter occur sparsely in the long epochs

* See Mr. Peach's Paper above referred to (page 17).

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intervening between the Carboniferous and the Tertiary, where they are much more varied and abundant. When my friend Mr. Scudder's paper* is published we shall know more about these interesting fossils, and be able to compare them more accurately with living genera, and see how far they differ from or agree with them. It will be interesting also to inquire what proportional difference or agreement there is between them in this respect, and the insects of the period, and also as to the climatal conditions then prevailing.

* Since this Paper was read (March 1882), I am able to give the following brief account of the results of his study of fossil Arachnids.  In his valuable paper, just published (June, 1883), on the Tertiary Lake Basin of Florisant, Colorado, America, he states that about 250 species of Tertiary Arachnides have been described, 190 of which are true spiders) and most of them are preserved in Eocene (Prussian) Amber. Other and various forms of spiders occur in the Eocene strata at Aix, and in the Miocene beds at Rott and Œningen.  The Tertiary (Oligocene) strata at Florisant have afforded 32 species of Araneides, or true spiders: 7 of these are new genera, and others have not been found before in a fossil state. Scudder refers only two Arachnides from the Palaeozoic rocks to the Araneides, and only one from the Jurassic; so that it is not until the much later Tertiary' Period that true spiders occur In any abundance or variety.  With regard to Scorpions there is a considerable difference, and they seem to have been fairly numerous in Palaeozoic times.

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