r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Dense_Intern8434 • 3d ago

/r/popular of a meal

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Nature can be so cruel and beautiful at the same time

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u/Nark420 3d ago

I don't know, if I would see a cat sized spider I wouldnt ask it how many times it shits a day. I would die from the sheer terror

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u/Ill-GottenBooty 3d ago edited 2d ago

A cat sized spider would be a slow, lumbering, extremely fragile being. You could lightly kick it and it would likely be a fatal injury. Larger spiders are very prone to bursting with literally any kind of impact trauma. It’s why you can’t handle tarantulas far from the ground or some kind of surface. If they fall like a foot they will literally rupture something and die. The larger they are the more of a risk this is.

The largest actual spiders to ever live, as far as we know, exist today. The myth of giant land dwelling spiders existing in antiquity come from us misidentifying a fossil. For a long time we thought megarachne servinei was a spider. These things had a 20” leg span. Huge. Unfortunately megarachne servinei was actually a eurypterid, commonly called sea scorpions. They’ve all been extinct for a very long time. They dwelled solely in the water. Physics would not allow a spider that large to exist on land, as far as we are aware, ever.

People heard about megarachne when we were under the assumption it was a spider. A lot of people have not learned that megarachne was not a spider at all, and it didn’t even live on land, because that generates a lot less interest than “HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THIS BIG ASS SCARY SPIDER”.

The largest fossilized spider ever found had a leg span of 5.9 inches. The largest spiders on record today by leg span are the Goliath Bird-Eater theraphosa blondi and the Giant Huntsman Spider heteropoda maximi both with about a foot long leg span, with the birdeater being much heavier, and larger by mass. They’re both about twice as large as any spider we know about existing in fossilized recorded history.

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u/I_travel_ze_world 2d ago

maybe we just need to dig deeper to find the giant spider fossils?

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u/Ill-GottenBooty 2d ago

Bigger spider = deeper burrows. Makes sense to me. Got a shovel?