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Description
For a bibliographic work last semester, I decided to draw all of the 13 described fossil species of my subject : sea spiders, or as they ar known in science "pycnogonids".

These little weirdos are distant relatives of arachnids and horseshoe crabs but diverged from them way back in the early cambrian. During all this time they became strange and skinny arthropods living on the sea floor, but as I saw it when I searched informations only a few of the fossil species where given paleoart, so I decided to do it myself !

First of the list is the cambrian species form Sweden, Cambropycnogon klausmuelleri. It's the oldest known species of pycnogonid, and several of its features mak it the most "primitive" of all of the sea spiders. I think it's a really interesting case in the understanding of the group evolution because right now it actually makes the whole pycnogonid group mainly defined on larvae features, and mostly by the "protonymphon" larvae, a type of larval stage only known in modern sea spider among current arthropods.

If you want to learn more about it here's the original publication from 2002 : onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pd…
There's only the supposition about antennae that is not making as much of a consensus as back then, today it's thought it might be remains of labrum, a structure known in all the other arthropods but unknown in pycnogonids.

Description
For a bibliographic work last semester, I decided to draw all of the 13 described fossil species of my subject : sea spiders, or as they ar known in science "pycnogonids".

These little weirdos are distant relatives of arachnids and horseshoe crabs but diverged from them way back in the early cambrian. During all this time they became strange and skinny arthropods living on the sea floor, but as I saw it when I searched informations only a few of the fossil species where given paleoart, so I decided to do it myself !

First of the list is the cambrian species form Sweden, Cambropycnogon klausmuelleri. It's the oldest known species of pycnogonid, and several of its features mak it the most "primitive" of all of the sea spiders. I think it's a really interesting case in the understanding of the group evolution because right now it actually makes the whole pycnogonid group mainly defined on larvae features, and mostly by the "protonymphon" larvae, a type of larval stage only known in modern sea spider among current arthropods.

If you want to learn more about it here's the original publication from 2002 : onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pd…
There's only the supposition about antennae that is not making as much of a consensus as back then, today it's thought it might be remains of labrum, a structure known in all the other arthropods but unknown in pycnogonids.