Act of ‘Heresy’ Adds Horseshoe Crabs to Arachnid Family Tree
The New York Times
A team of researchers say that rather than occupying their own branch in the history of life on Earth, horseshoe crabs are in the same group as spiders and scorpions.
Horseshoe crabs are little armored vehicles with bright blue blood. For hundreds of millions of years, they’ve been trundling along the ocean floor. In all that time, other mighty creatures have come and gone: dinosaurs, mammoths, terror birds, Neanderthals. The humble horseshoe crab has lived on, looking not that different these days from their forebears in the Mesozoic Era.
“I find their fossil record amazing, fantastic and brilliant,” said Russell Bicknell, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia who studies the crabs’ evolution and development. “I just love that with, realistically, such a tiny tool kit, they’ve managed to do so much.”
But while the horseshoe crab may seem eternal, it has been pulled into the middle of a scientific controversy.
