A team used fluorescence microscopy to analyze the supposed spider and differentiate what parts of the specimen were fossilized organism, and which parts were potentially doctored.

The locals sold the fossil to scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in Liaoning, China, who published a description of the fossil species in Acta Geologica Sinica, the peer-reviewed journal of the Geological Society of China. The Chinese team gave the spider the scientific name Mongolarachne chaoyangensis.

But other scientists in Beijing, upon seeing the paper, had suspicions. The spider fossil was huge and strange looking. Concerned, they contacted a U.S. colleague who specializes in ancient spider fossils: Paul Selden, distinguished professor of invertebrate paleontology in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas.

«I was obviously very skeptical,» Selden said. «The paper had very few details, so my colleagues in Beijing borrowed the specimen from the people in the Southern University, and I got to look at it. Immediately, I realized there was something wrong with it — it clearly wasn’t a spider. It was missing various parts, had too many segments in its six legs, and huge eyes. I puzzled and puzzled over it until my colleague in Beijing, Chungkun Shih, said, ‘Well, you know, there’s quite a lot of crayfish in this particular locality. Maybe it’s one of those.’ So, I realized what happened was I got a very badly preserved crayfish onto which someone had painted on some legs.»

Selden and his colleagues at KU and in China (including the lead author of the paper originally describing the fossil) recently published an account of their detective work in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeoentomology.

«These things are dug up by local farmers mostly, and they see what money they can get for them,» Selden said. «They obviously picked up this thing and thought, ‘Well, you know, it looks a bit like a spider.’ And so, they thought they’d paint on some legs — but it’s done rather skillfully. So, at first glance, or from a distance, it looks pretty good. It’s not till you get down to the microscope and look in detail that you realize they’re clearly things wrong with it. And, of course, the people who described it are perfectly good paleontologists — they’re just not experts on spiders. So, they were taken in.»

In possession of the original fossil specimen at KU, Selden teamed up with his graduate student Matt Downen and with Alison Olcott, associate professor of geology. The team used fluorescence microscopy to analyze the supposed spider and differentiate what parts of the specimen were fossilized organism, and which parts were potentially doctored.

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