Unknown

Wow that was hard to find... Lampshade spider of the genus Hypochilus Nature did a cool writeup on it: "This gray and brown spider is often referred to as a living fossil because it has all of the primitive characteristics of the earliest true spiders, Hedin says. “They occupy an interesting place on the spider tree of life,” he says. They live isolated in small, rocky outcrops in the Appalachian and Rocky mountains and some ranges in California, and have evolved slower than most of their counterparts. “They have features you might expect to see in an ancestor that has gone extinct,” he says, adding that most of the differences are obscure and specialized. The Hypochilus is also called a “lampshade spider” because of the beautiful webs they form off of rocks that resemble their namesake." https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/10/26/ten-creepiest-spiders-north-america-weird-nature-science/

Please does anyone know what this is? I found a rock wall covered with them along the Fiery Gizzard trail in Tennessee. With legs stretched out they would probably have been 3-4 inches long, and were sitting on the rock inside of these large funnels which were usually a foot wide at the mouth and stuck out at least a foot. I go out of my way to find spiders in Tennessee, and have never seen anything like it. This is the only picture I've found online, but this is it for sure.

A beautiful web....