When you think of spiders, you might get the heebie-jeebies - all those legs, those fuzzy bodies and the molting (don't forget the molting) - but if spiders had a P.R. team, "Skeletorus" and "Sparklemuffin" would be the poster children for spider rebranding.
Skeletorus and Sparklemuffin are nicknames for two news species of peacock spiders discovered in Australia, according to Live Science. Peacock spiders were given the descriptive moniker due to their bright colors and courtship rituals that appear dance-like.
The two newly discovered species were found in southeast Queensland by Madeline Girard, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Girard gave Maratus jactatus the playful nickname Sparklemuffin for the colorful stripes and she gave Maratus sceletus the nickname Skeletorus due to the black and white markings that look a bit like a skeleton.
Skeletorus "looks dramatically different [from] all other peacock spiders known to date, making me think that this group is perhaps much more diverse than we had thought," said entomologist and report co-author Jürgen Otto, according to Live Science. (The report is published in the journal Peckhamia).
"Despite the large number of species we have discovered just in the last few years, I can't help feeling that we may have just scratched the surface of this most exciting group of spiders, and that nature has quite a few more surprises in store," Otto said.
