Earlier this year, scientists announced the mother of all placental mammals. Their discovery wasn’t due to an unburied fossil, but rather a database called MorphoBank.

The researchers used both genetic and physical traits of known animals (living and extinct) to reconstruct this common ancestor that likely diversified after the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The scientists recorded observational traits for 86 placental mammal species, including 40 fossil species. The resulting database contains more than 12,000 images that correspond to more than 4,500 traits detailing characteristics like the presence or absence of wings, teeth and certain bones, type of hair cover and brain structures. The dataset is about 10 times larger than information used in previous studies of mammal relationships. On MorphoBank, this study is known as Project 773. And it’s just one of nearly a thousand such projects…

MorphoBank began over ten years ago as a partnership between several institutions to create a “web application providing an online database and workspace for evolutionary research, specifically systematics (the science of determining the evolutionary relationships among species),” according to its website.  The information is open to everyone and the framework provides access to computing power that scientists might not otherwise have.

Cassie Graff, the Early Childhood Program Lead here at the Academy, was an undergraduate at UC San Diego in 2009, when the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) was looking to beta test MorphoBank. The SDSC wanted to determine how actual researchers would use the application and reached out to their local colleagues.

Annalisa Berta, an evolutionary biologist at San Diego State University, was working on a long-term project to create a morphology matrix of whales at the time, and it seemed a perfect fit for MorphoBank. Berta and her team, which included Graff, entered several morphological characteristics of extinct and extant (living) whales into the database. Graff entered color patterns like streaks and saddles and flipper coloration as codes into the matrix. This work eventually became Project 182 on MorphoBank.

“The database includes not only morphological traits, but also can provide genetic data and images to create taxonomic trees,” Graff explains. “It can hold all of your research and later everyone can access it, anyone can download matrices.”

For a more recent project, MorphoBank approached Academy and UC Davis postdoc Hannah Wood. They asked about her recent publication on pelican spiders and wanted to make the morphological datasets within that article available. Generally these datasets appear as an appendix to a publication. “MorphoBank makes it much easier for other scientists to access the data,” says Wood. And it’s important that scientists have that access, she explains. Her co-author, the Academy’s Charles Griswold, agrees. “One could look at other, existing spiders to see similarities and identify a new find.” Their pelican spiders are Project 847 on MorphoBank.

As researchers work to revise and grow the tree of life, they need to build upon the work of scientists that came before—and leverage the work of their modern day colleagues. MorphoBank, along with similar applications, promises 21st-century solutions to studies that began centuries ago.

When you and I look at spiders, we might see something creepy or cool (depending on your inclination), but when these scientists look at spiders, they see millions of years in the past.

Charles Griswold, Hannah Wood, Rosemary Gillespie and Nick Matzke painstakingly studied a superfamily of spiders called Palpimanoidea, aka assassin spiders.

The Academy and University of California researchers wanted to determine how these spiders are related and distributed and how that’s changed for the millions of years they have lived on Earth.

This superfamily has been assembled and separated many times over the past three decades.  The superfamily includes the trap jaw spiders (Mecysmaucheniidae), forest rubies (Stenochilidae), the mysterious Hutton’s spider (Huttoniidae), palp-footed spiders (Palpimanidae) and the pelican spiders (Archaeidae).

They’re called assassin spiders because all of the families except the trap jaw spiders hunt, kill and eat other spiders. Trap jaw spiders have an unusual feeding pattern, too. They have incredibly strong and fast jaws that lock open and then release quickly to trap prey.

While most of the living species within the assassin spiders live in the southern hemisphere, grouping these spiders is tricky because they have disjunct distributions, separated by barriers, namely large oceans.

Scientists love when things are tricky: it raises new questions to research. That couldn’t be more true for this group of folks. Charles has always been interested in biogeography and continental drift. Rosie Gillespie has always been interested in life on islands—what lives there, how did it get there and how did it diversify? Hannah’s fascinated by the pelican spiders and Nick is a paleontologist and computational biologist, attracted by the statistics of dating phylogenies.

It’s good that their interests are diverse, Charles says. “Science has become technologically and mathematically complex. It now requires a team of researchers.”

Hannah and Charles traveled throughout the southern hemisphere collecting and studying these spiders for many years. To answer the tricky questions this superfamily poses, they began with a thorough comparative morphology of all the spiders, living and extinct. Many of the fossils were specimens trapped in amber—which preserves the spiders “like new,” Charles says.

The scientists used whatever tools they could get their hands on—microscopy, current dissection technology, CT-scans, even the synchrotron at the Advanced Light Source at UC Berkeley.

The team gleaned data from DNA collected for every living spider. Then came the number crunching. Data were processed on the computer cluster here at the Academy and the San Diego Super Computer Center.

Charles explains that their findings confirm four different theories.

First, they confirm that these spiders all belong to Palpimanoidea.  “The phylogeny and classification encompasses the true scope of the superfamily,” Charles says.

Second, one of the fossil spiders they studied, an Archaeidae species, was discovered in the northern hemisphere. But all of the living relatives reside in the southern hemisphere. As David Byrne might ask, “How did I get here?” Charles and Hannah have an answer—continental drift. The lineage is so ancient, it’s consistent with the dates of continental drift.

Third and fourth, these spiders are found on the islands of Madagascar and New Zealand.  Geologists know that these two islands were originally pieces of their nearby continents that became separated. When they broke-off is clear, Charles says, but what is controversial is if some life forms have been around since the islands were connected to continent. .  Many animals and plants may have dispersed there.  The dates of these spiders originate prior to island separation, showing they have endured since the islands first broke away from the continents.

This superfamily of spiders, Charles says, is one of the “best examples of distribution that reflects continental drift. The distribution patterns, age of the fossils, and dates of phylogenic diversification are old enough. It’s one of the best documented cases of the results of continental drift.”

If you’ve seen our Earthquake exhibit, you know there are other examples of animal and plant evidence of continental drift. These spiders add nicely to it.

The study was published last month in Systematic Biology.

Charles will now take these methods to look at the biogeography of other groups of spiders. Hannah is looking more deeply into the trap jaw mechanism of those amazing spiders. Stay tuned for more spiderific stories!

Huttonia spider image: SE Thorpe/Wikipedia

They found an unusual spider while combing the caves and sent it to a student researcher here at the Academy to identify. She had trouble putting the specimen to a species and sent it on to a postdoc down the hall. He had the same trouble.

Enter Charles Griswold, head of arachnology at the Academy. Charles identified the mystery spider as the feared brown recluse at first, but then he looked closer. “The eyes were all wrong, the claws wrong, the jaws wrong. It was not a brown recluse,” he says.

Now Charles knows a lot about spiders, but even he knows when he’s stumped. So he consulted the bible for spiders in the US—Spiders of North America. The spider, nicknamed Mysteridae, wasn’t in it. He consulted the world guide. Not there, either. “It didn’t fit anything, “ he says.

Charles, postdoc Joel Ledford, and student Tracy Audisio dissected the specimen and examined the spider’s anatomy. The more they investigated, the more they realized that this spider didn’t match up with any family they’d seen. They reached out to colleagues and one recognized shading at the spinnerets, or spinning organs, similar to shading on goblin spiders. Still, the breathing organs (tracheae) and enormous claws were nothing like goblin spiders.

So Charles, Joel and Tracy realized they had a whole new spider, from a whole new family, related to the goblin spiders. And they named the new spider Trogloraptor marchingtoni—troglo meaning caves and raptor, meaning grabber, seizer, or robber.

And marchingtoni? For Neil Marchington, deputy sheriff, amateur biologist and cave conservancy member who found the spider in the first place!

The species is described in ZooKeys.

Images: Trogloraptor; Joel Ledford, Charles Griswold, Tracy Audisio

Happy Halloween! We thought we’d get you in the mood with spiders and some of the creepiest ones, to boot—Lycosoidea.

What are Lycosoidea? They are the wolf spiders and their kin, with probably 10,000 species around the world, known and undiscovered (what’s that under your bed?). Since they are major predators (and prey) around streams and rivers, they are ecologically vital. The legendary tarantula of the Mediterranean, a supposedly venomous spider for which the only bite cure is to dance the tarantella, belongs here. Schizocosa is a model organism for studies in invertebrate behavior, perception and learning, and Cupeinnius is the model for understanding spider senses (just ask Tobey Maguire). The South America tropical wolf spider Phoneutria, with its deadly combination of venom, attitude and familiarity, is probably the most dangerous spider in the world.

The California Academy of Sciences has one of the world’s best collections of these spiders. During September, spider experts and students from across the US and from three countries in South America met to study the collection and share information. The aim was to understand the phylogeny—or evolutionary history—of Lycosoidea. From this understanding, the scientists hope to make generalizations about invertebrate evolution and geography and make predictions about venoms and venom therapies.

Collectively these researchers are assembling a dataset of more than 300 observations across 80 species, representing the full range of these spiders.

Participants included the Academy’s Charles Griswold and Darrell Ubick, Tracy Audisio and Liz Morrill (San Francisco State University), Natalia Chousou Polydouri (UC Berkeley), Petra Sierwald (Field Museum in Chicago), Diana Silva Dávila (Peru), Luis Piacentini (Argentina), and Lina Almeida, Daniele Polotow and Estevam Cruz (Brazil).

The “Lycosoidea Summit” was made possible by the resources of the Academy, including gifts from the Schlinger Foundation and estate of Bill and Maria Peck, the Lakeside Fund for International Students, and the Harriet Exline Frizzell Fund of the Academy’s Department of Entomology.

I asked Charles, our fearless curator of arachnology, why he studies these spiders.

Nothing really makes sense except in the context of evolution, and our job is to map evolution. So the evolution of a big, ecologically and medically important group like these spiders is information that some of us need now, and everyone may need in the future.

Our aim is to find the phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, of these spiders. So we’re not specifically studying venom, or behavior, etc., except insofar as these data help to inform the phylogeny.

But, in the case of deadly spiders like Phoneutria, an understanding of its place in the phylogeny also provides a potential map of the evolution of its venom.

Learn more about the research Charles and his colleagues do here. He was also featured recently on ABC7’s production of “Reefs to Rainforests: The Great Expedition,” available online here.

Greg Farrington is the Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences.

Image: Opoterser/Wikipedia