An Extraordinary New Family of Spiders from Caves in the Pacific Northwest

These undated photos from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco show the fearsome claw of a new family of spider, which led to naming it Trogloraptor, or cave robber. A group of amateur spelunkers found it in a cave outside Grants Pass, Oregon in 2010. They sent specimens to the Academy, where scientists had never seen anything like it. Since then, scientists have found a related species in the Redwoods of Northern California. The discovery is described in an article published Friday in the online edition of the journal Zookeys. (Calfornia Academy of Sciences)