Steve Tessler was the next to meet the spider. As an undergraduate at Penn State, Tessler was hired by Snetsinger to manage the university’s collection of preserved spiders. He didn’t plan to study the Pennsylvanian purseweb at first, but spotting their webs slowly became a personal hobby. He found a population of the spider at Naylors Run Park, down the hill from his former high school. There, Tessler collected several spiders and described their habitat, sending his findings to famous arachnologist Norman Platnick, who wrote a 1980 paper about Atypus purseweb spiders.