The golden-orb weaver spiders are famous for their golden silk and females can spin webs up to 1.5 metres in diametre. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s about the size of a sixth grader.

Now the area is a grassland region known as McGraths Flat. Researchers have named the spider fossil ‘Megamonodontium mccluskyi’. It would have lived in the Miocene period 11m to 16m years ago.

Spiders Alive, developed by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, runs through mid-April. Seventeen species of arachnids will be on display at Canada's largest botanical gardens near ...