Attercopus is an extinct genus of arachnids, containing one species Attercopus fimbriunguis, known from flattened cuticle fossils from the Panther Mountain Formation in Upstate New York. It is placed in the extinct order Uraraneida, spider-like animals able to produce silk, but which lacked true spinnerets and retained a segmented abdomen bearing a flagellum-like tail resembling that of a whip scorpion. They are thought to be close to the origins of spiders.
Attercopus is an extinct genus of arachnids, containing one species Attercopus fimbriunguis, known from flattened cuticle fossils from the Panther Mountain Formation in Upstate New York. It is placed in the extinct order Uraraneida, spider-like animals able to produce silk, but which lacked true spinnerets and retained a segmented abdomen bearing a flagellum-like tail resembling that of a whip scorpion. They are thought to be close to the origins of spiders.
Its name is taken from the English dialect word attercop ("spider"), which came from ' ("poison-head"), from ' ("poison"), itself drawn from the Proto-Germanic *aitra- ("poisonous ulcer") and kopp- ("head"). In The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien had Bilbo use attercop to insult attacking spiders, the insult possibly deriving from its meaning in Northern England dialect of "peevish, ill-natured person". Cop or cob had also come to mean spider, as in cobweb.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).