When a huge ancient spider was unearthed by fossil hunters in China earlier this year, scientists were excited.
When the Dalian Natural History Museum in Liaoning subsequently published a description of the new species, scientists were suspicious.
The fossilized arachnid, dubbed Mongolarachne chaoyangensis, was, by all accounts, “strange looking.”
Hoping for a second opinion, researchers in Beijing contacted a U.S. associate who specializes in ancient spider fossils: Paul Seldon, professor of invertebrate paleontology at the University of Kansas.
“I was obviously very skeptical,” Selden said in a statement. “The paper had very few details, so my colleagues in Beijing borrowed the specimen … and I got to look at it. “Immediately, I realized there was something wrong with it—it clearly wasn’t a spider.
“It was missing various parts, had too many segments in its six legs, and huge eyes,” he continued. “I puzzled and puzzled over it until my colleague in Beijing, Chungkun Shih, said, ‘Well, you know, there’s quite a lot of crayfish in this particular locality. Maybe it’s one of those.’
“So, I realized what happened was I got a very badly preserved crayfish onto which someone had painted on some legs,” Seldon admitted.
Image A shows a mosaic of parts of the specimen as seen under fluorescence microscopy; image B is a map of specimen showing cracks, cemented areas (grey), and painted parts (brown) (via Seldon, et al/University of Kansas)
He teamed up with KU graduate student Matt Downen and associate professor Alison Olcott to analyze the supposed spider and identify which parts of the fossil were real and faked.
Using fluorescence microscopy, they were able to highlight four distinct regions: bright white (probably a mended crack), bright blue (likely from mineral composition of the host rock), bright yellow (indicating oil-based paint), and dull red (believed to be remnants of the original crayfish skeleton).
It’s unclear how much the fossil artists earned for their fake relic.
The KU researchers, in partnership with scientists from China, recently published an account of their detective work in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeoentomology.
“These things are dug up by local farmers mostly, and they see what money they can get for them,” Seldon explained. “They obviously picked up this thing and thought, ‘Well, you know, it looks a bit like a spider.’ And so they thought they’d paint on some legs—but it’s done rather skillfully.”
To the untrained eye, the specimen looks real. It’s not until you (er, a specialist) look at it in microscopic detail that it becomes clear that something is wrong.
That’s not to say the people who first described M. chaoyangensis aren’t good at their job.
“They’re just not experts on spiders,” Seldon said. “So they were taken in.”
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