The Chilean rose tarantula (Grammostola rosea), also known as the rose hair tarantula
© Getty
Tarantulas, everyone’s favourite hairy spiders, are found worldwide, inhabiting all continents except Antarctica. But how did they become so widespread? To answer this question, researchers went looking for the origins of the tarantula group more than 100 million years ago, building a tarantula family tree based on molecular clues from existing databases. Once they created the tree, they mapped it to a timeline of spider fossils to estimate when – and where – tarantulas appeared and dispersed.