Say Goodbye to the World's Oldest Spider, Dead at 43
By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | May 1, 2018 05:30pm ET
She was known only as Number 16 by the researchers who studied her. Little about her behavior or appearance was out of the ordinary. But Number 16 was special — she was the oldest known spider in the world.
Number 16, a trapdoor spider (Gaius villosus), was first spotted as a wee spiderling in 1974, and appeared in arachnid research surveys conducted at a site in Australia's North Bungulla Reserve, through 2016. As the years rolled by, the spider lived on — through Watergate, the release of the first IBM personal computer, and the debut of the World Wide Web.
https://www.livescience.com/62452-worlds-oldest-spider-dies.html
