I appear to have a house-guest in the form of a rather large spider. The body was about 3 cm long and perhaps 1 cm in width. The abdomen was not overly large with respect to the rest of the critter, around a third of the length. The colour was a glossy black, indicating a hard carapace. The legs were more like a cranefly than a spider, very thin. I’m in Aberdeen, north Scotland, but there’s both a port and an airport here so the spider could have come from anywhere.
I’ve checked a few UK sites, including ants and insects and drawn a blank. Can you identify it?
This thing was a glossy jet black. There didn’t seem to be any separation between the parts of the body. The head, abdomen, and thorax seemed to be approximately equal-sized. It didn’t look like Formica Fusca, nor Formica picea, nor Lasius niger. I didn’t notice antennae.
If you’re not sure how many legs it had, how many body parts it had, or whether it was a spider or a beetle, I doubt we can ID it from a vague description. We need either a photo (preferably) or a detailed description.
How long is “long”? Are we talking leg span of 4cm here, or 8cm? I can’t even picture a bug with a 3cm long body and long, spindly legs. Unless the body is very narrow?
It appeared to be a spider with 8 legs. It appeared to have three body parts. It was a glossy black. Not hairy. The legs were very thin. The span of the legs as it walked was not great - it kept the inverted V quite tight.
I’ve identified bugs from pretty slim information, but it has to be accurate.
There is no such animal. Both these things can’t be true at the same time. Insects have three body parts and six legs; spiders and some other arachnids have eight legs and two body parts; harvestmen/daddy longlegs have eight legs and apparently one body part. So one of these observations is incorrect.
You either imagined two extra legs or an extra body part. In all probability, you mistook 6 legs in motion for 8 legs, so what you saw was probably an insect. And you also say there were no wings, but wings can lie very flat and unobtrusive.