Madagascarchaea gracilicollis
Madagascarchaea gracilicollis is a member of the family Archaeidae, assassin spiders. It is merely 2 mm long and catches other spiders with venomous fangs at the end of its hugely elongated jaws (chelicerae).

Sarefo · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- MadagascarchaeaPBDB
- Life habit
- solitaryPBDB, for Arachnida
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arachnida
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Arachnida
Time the record covers
At most 12 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 11.7 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Madagascarchaea gracilicollis on record, most of them in the Holocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
2 occurrences- Holocene100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Madagascarchaea gracilicollis and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Madagascarchaea gracilicollis and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
38 taxa- Argyrodes (Ariamnes) resina1 site
- Argyrodes (Rhomphaea) gibbifera1 site
- Ariadna copalis1 site
- Ariadna hintzei1 site
- Ceratinopsis deformans1 site
- Copaldictyna madagascariensis1 site
- Deinopis madagascariensis1 site
- Dictyna rufa1 site
- Eidmanella pallida1 site
- Flagelldictyna copalis1 site
- Garcorops jadis1 site
- Hersilia madagascariensis1 site
- Hersiliana brevipes1 site
- Hersiliidae1 site
- Lasaeola1 site
- Lasaeola (Phycosoma) inclinata1 site
- Madagascarphantes vomerans1 site
- Miagrammopes1 site
- Migidae1 site
- Minutunguis silvestris1 site
- Miturgidae1 site
- Mysmena1 site
- Mysmena copalis1 site
- Mysmena dominicana1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Madagascarchaea gracilicollis, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
2 references- Fossil and extant spiders (Araneae) of the superfamily Eresoidea s.l., with special reference to the Archaeidae and remarks on some higher taxa of the superfamily Araneoidea1
- Premier cas d'un sub-fossile d'araignée appartenant au genre Archaea Koch and Berendt (Archaeidae) dans le copal de Madagascar1
Each of the 2 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Madagascarchaea gracilicollis
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Sarefo
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Madagascarchaea gracilicollis was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itMadagascarchaea through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Millot 1948)