Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. He was one of the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a sardonic humor. Among his numerous contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos is Atlach-Nacha, the spider God, first introduced in “The Seven Geases” (Weird Tales, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 1934). Atlach-Nacha resembles a huge spider with an almost-human face. It dwells within a huge cavern deep beneath Mount Voormithadreth, a mountain in the now vanished kingdom of Hyperborea in the Arctic. The bloated purple spiders of Leng are thought to be its children and servitors.

From Greek mythology to African folklore, the spider has been used to represent a variety of things, and gained a reputation for causing irrational fear in humans. Among the oldest known land arthropods are Trigonotarbids, an extinct order of terrestrial arachnids related to modern day spiders. The earliest trigonotarbid known in the fossil record is from the Silurian Ludlow Bone Bed. In 1923, Stanley Hirst described five species of trigonotarbids from the Rhynie cherts under the generic names Palaeocharinoides and Palaeocharinus. These are Palaeocharinoides hornei, Palaeocharinus rhyniensis, P. scourfieldi, P.calmani and P. kidstoni.

Spiders (Order Araneae) are massively abundant generalist arthropod predators that are found in nearly every ecosystem on the planet since the Devonian (>380 mya). The oldest true spiders belonged to the Mesothelae. Mongolarachne jurassica, from Daohuogo, Inner Mongolia in China, is the largest known fossil spider. Mongolarachne is remarkable for being larger than its female counterpart, Nephila jurassica, found on the same site in 2011.

References:

Garrison, Nicole L.; Rodriguez, Juanita; Agnarsson, Ingi; Coddington, Jonathan A.; Griswold, Charles E.; Hamilton, Christopher A.; Hedin, Marshal; Kocot, Kevin M.; Ledford, Joel M.; Bond, Jason E. (2016). “Spider phylogenomics: untangling the Spider Tree of Life”. PeerJ. 4: e1719. doi:10.7717/peerj.1719

Garwood, Russell J.; Dunlop, Jason (July 2014). “The walking dead: Blender as a tool for paleontologists with a case study on extinct arachnids”. Journal of Paleontology. Paleontological Society. 88 (4): 735–746. doi:10.1666/13-088