New scientific paper on fossil arachnid

The May edition of the 'Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society' will feature a short paper on a specimen that has been in the collections at Bolton for nearly a century.

The specimen in question is a fossil of something called Maiocercus orbicularis, a creature related to spiders and scorpions. It was originally named in 1911 and has been at Bolton since at least that time.

The new paper has been written by Bolton Museum palaeontologist David Craven and was co-authored with Jason Dunlop, Curator of Arthropods at the Humboldt University Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.

Jason had actually reported the specimen missing in a paper in 1996. The specimen was never really “lost”, but in 2004 there was no geologist at Bolton and the collections were moving to new storage, which had prevented anyone from checking for it.

For much more detail on this specimen, go to the Maiocercus orbicularis page in the Local Geology section.

The full reference is:
Craven, D.J., Dunlop, J.A. 2008 The holotype of the trigonotarbid arachnid Maiocercus orbicularis (Gill 1911), a junior synonym of M. celticus (Pocock 1902)
Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, 57, 63-64

Feed Keyword: museum-news