Tarantulas conquered Earth by spreading over a supercontinent, then riding its broken pieces across
Tarantulas conquered Earth by spreading over a supercontinent, then riding its broken pieces across the ocean
By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 19 hours ago
Tarantulas, everyone's favorite hairy spiders, are found worldwide, inhabiting all continents except Antarctica. But how did they become so widespread? Females rarely leave their burrows, spiderlings stick close to where they hatch, and mature males only travel when they're searching for a mate.
To answer this question, researchers went looking for the origins of the tarantula group more than 100 million years ago, building a tarantula family tree based on molecular clues from existing databases of spiders' transcriptomes — the protein-coding portion of the genome, found in ribonucleic acid, or RNA.
Once they created the tree, they mapped it to a timeline of spider fossils, to estimate when — and where — tarantulas appeared and dispersed.
The scientists discovered that tarantulas first emerged during the Cretaceous period in what is now the Americas. But at the time, the Americas were part of the massive supercontinent Gondwana. Ancient tarantula relatives, even if they were homebodies like tarantulas today, likely spread across the joined landmasses, dispersing from the Americas into Africa, Australia and India. Then, after Gondwana broke apart, India separated from Madagascar and collided with Asia — and brought the hairy spiders to that continent, too, he researchers reported.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/tarantulas-global-takeover.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=OAP_Newsletter&utm_content=OAP_Newsletter+&utm_term=3403514&m_i=xugQyIil_68h2TTfLqBdGENM1r4bKaTqvIJdTEDr9GGsKZ5e5kI0_RW1ZGbEdmIH_ckxc3JhUJP3UKvExT61HiS_dGfXmT2GiPWigOgxxh
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(Conquered Earth, did they?)
