Spiders,Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction

By the 1850s, the representation of the spider in Victorian natural history was beginning to change. No longer associated solely with ingenuity and industry, the spider took on more disturbing connotations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unable to pin down the creature's precise rhetorical and metaphorical function, naturalists could not decide whether the spider ought to be loved or feared and at the same time the spider began to emerge as a ubiquitous, protean and unstable Gothic trope in popular fiction. While natural history books warned of the hazards of the foreign spider's bite, in adventure fiction the alien arachnid lurks in liminal spaces far from the safety of British shores. Much maligned as the unfamiliar Other, the spider caused – and mitigated – anxieties about the limits of the human. In the Gothic empire fiction of Bertram Mitford and H.G. Wells, the spider takes on the role of the harbinger of death on both sides of the colonial encounter.     

Fossil arachnids from the earliest Miocene Foulden Maar Fossil-Lagerstätte,New Zealand

Selden, P.A. & Kaulfuss, U., May 2018. Fossil arachnids from the earliest Miocene Foulden Maar Fossil-Lagerstätte, New Zealand. Alcheringa XX, XX–XX. ISSN 0311-5518.

Fossil Arachnida from New Zealand are extremely rare and represented by some unidentifiable amber inclusions only. The first fossil arachnids from New Zealand to be described in detail are presented here, based on four compression fossils from the earliest Miocene Fossil-Lagerstätte at Foulden Maar, South Island. Two specimens are referred to Arachnida incertae sedis and Araneomorpha incertae sedis, respectively, whereas two specimens are mygalomorph spiders. One of these is placed in the Rastelloidina clade of Mygalomorphae, probably in the Idiopidae, which is represented in New Zealand by the extant Cantuaria.

P.A. Selden* [selden@ku.edu] Paleontological Institute and Department of Geology, University of Kansas, Lindley Hall, 1475 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA; U. Kaulfuss [uwe.kaulfuss@otago.ac.nz] Department of Geology, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand. *Also affiliated with: Natural History Museum, London, UK.