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| 15 cm very dead spider. from BBC. |
Although worth a List-Day Topic, irrational fears are best ignored. That said, spiders top my list for unfounded phobias. As a child, I believed that if I tried to kill a spider and failed, the spider would report this misdeed to the spider Mafia and I would be attacked in the night as I slept. Thus, when I saw a spider, I would ignore it unless I could execute a clean kill without being observed by its many eyed brethren. My approach to this phobia radically changed when a Baylor colleague introduced me to arachnology: if you fear it, study it. With that background, I was actually excited by the recent discovery of the largest fossilized spider. (Fossilzed spiders are better than live spiders.) Paul Selden, the Gulf-Hedberg Distinguished Professor of Invertebrate Paleontology at the University of Kansas, explains that the fossil is a 165 million year old female Nephila, an ancestor of the Golden Orb Weaver. I am not clear how he knows it is a female.
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