Bird-eating spiders?! 3 new species of giant tarantulas discovered

Three new species of massive, furry “birdeater” spiders have been discovered, with dozens more stricken from the grouping.
In a new paper published in the open-access journal ZooKeys, researchers cleaned house on the genus Avicularia, a group of hairy tarantula spiders that was, in the words of lead study author Caroline Sayuri Fukushima, “a huge mess.”
Fukushima, a researcher at the Instituto Butantan in São Paulo, Brazil, and her colleagues sorted out the genus, which was first described in 1818. They narrowed the number of Avicularia species from more than 50 to 12, including three new species of Avicularia that hadn’t been noted before. They named one of these species after Maria Sibylla Merian, a naturalist born in 1647 who famously painted an illustration of an Avicularia spider eating a bird. [See Amazing Photos of Goliath Birdeater Spiders]
“This illustration gave origin to the name of the genus and the popular name birdeater spiders,” Fukushima told Live Science in an email. “People [in] that time did not believe in her observations, saying that a spider eating a bird was a female fantasy. But now we know she is right!”-READ MORE AND SEE 28 PHOTOS