Part Spider - Part Scorpion Creature Found In Amber
http://www.geologyin.com/2018/02/part-spider-part-scorpion-creature.htmlA new, bizarre spider-like creature has just been discovered in Southeast Asia, having been encased in amber during the Cretaceous period some 100 million years ago, and it might be more terrifying than any of the creepy-crawlies lurking in the dark corners of your basement.
Amber mined for centuries in Myanmar for jewelry is a treasure trove for understanding the evolution of spiders and their other arachnid relatives. This week, two independent teams describe four 100-million-year-old specimens encased in amber that look like a cross between a spider and a scorpion.
The discovery, “could help close major gaps in our understanding of spider evolution,” says Prashant Sharma, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who was not involved in the work.
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But in 1989, researchers discovered a suspicious, spigot-bearing fossil that was 100 million years older than the earliest known spider. By 2008, paleobiologists realized that this ancient silk producer was just a spider relative, perhaps a stepping stone to true spiders. Researchers put it into the group Uraraneida, which was thought to have thrived between 400 million and 250 million years ago. That left unanswered many questions about when spinnerets and other spider traits first evolved.
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These guys were the precursors to true scorpions.
Imagine swimming around and coming across this beast!!!
Edit: Here's another pic...
(No, it's isn't real. It's animatronic but built to be a close representation of the earliest eurypterid that lived)
with a little drawn butter. 
Eurypterids have always fascinated me. I saw a cloud shaped exactly like them once. I should've photographed it.
They were attacking a school of fish that were traveling back to their spawning ground. Even though they were only CGI, they still freaked me out. 
"Walking with Dinosaurs".
Good show, overall. A little loose with the facts here and there to keep the show going.
I've recently been reading about Pterosaurs as there's been a renaissance in understanding of them over the past 20 years or so. Amazing reptiles. There's never been anything like them since. Truly, they ruled the sky for millions of years.
Which of course, led to reading more about how Dinosaurs are still among us in the form of birds. It seems like every Theropod had feathers.
