this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Arachnology
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Kind of a ridiculous size comparison. I can touch the top of my refrigerator, but that doesn’t make me the size of one…
I don't know... I'd say comparing a 6.5-inch spider to a basketball is pretty close.
And I'm never going down any Mexican mines.
I don’t think that spider is even as big as the author seems to think it is. She seems to have taken the 10 cm leg length and applied that to each leg, when it’s really the approximate diagonal leg span. I went and found the paper describing that new genus/species and the longest leg length measured was just over 2 inches. So they are big spiders, but not the monsters she seems to think they are. I guess I also don’t care for spider size comparison to spheres because it implies a volume that they just don’t have and it feels like sensationalism to me.
A basketball is significantly larger than that. And the article title currently says "softball" which is more like it. Perhaps they changed that to correct the distortion since it was posted here.
I emailed the author last night to let her know. She got back to me really quick and said they would correct, which I appreciated.