This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a paper published last week in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Gainett, now at Boston Children’s Hospital, and his co-authors report that they believe they have discovered remnants in the harvestman species Phalangium opilio of what may have once been fully functional eyes in the arachnids’ ancestors.

Arachnids include spiders, scorpions, harvestmen and other arthropods, and divining the relationships among this sprawling group of organisms is tricky.

Looking at the shapes traced by the tags, he matched the locations of the unexpected opsins on the harvestmen to approximately where extra eyes grow on spiders and horseshoe crabs.

The discovery of these vestigial eyes may help link the fossils, which are thought to be more than 400 million years old, more directly with their descendants, clarifying their place on the arachnid family tree.

The researchers also found that a variety of genes connected to vision were involved in shaping these vestigial eyes, two of which are just above the joints of the harvestman’s legs.

The findings highlight the serendipity that sometimes results from scientific discoveries: Dr. Gainett and Dr. Sharma had been hoping to understand the process by which arachnids that don’t need multiple pairs of eyes might give them up over evolutionary time.

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