A large hairy spider found primarily in tropical and subtropical America, where some kinds are able to catch small lizards, frogs, and birds: The biologists were studying the various kinds of hairy tarantula spiders.

Tarantula is the name for any of various large, hairy, ground-dwelling, predaceous (hunter and killer) spiders.

Tarantulas are large black wolf spiders of southern Europe whose bites were formerly believed to cause tarantism or what appeared to be an uncontrollable desire to dance.

The historical background of tarantula spiders

In about 708 B.C., a group of Greeks from Sparta moved across the Adriatic Sea and established a colony on a favorable spot on a seacoast in southern Italy called Tarentum.

The current city, now called Taranto, is a naval base in Italy; however, the region around ancient Tarentum had a species of fearsome-looking, hairy spiders that were capable of inflicting painful, if not dangerous, bites.

Based on the name of the place where this spider was discovered, it was called a tarantula and so, during the MiddleAges, when a strange disease broke out in various parts of Europe which caused twitching or jerking of the limbs of the people that were afflicted and was accompanied by an almost uncontrollable impulse to dance, it was blamed on the bites of the tarantulas.

Based on the false belief that tarantula bites caused the disease, the so called dance was called tarantism and now it is called chorea (Greek, choreia, "dance"), disorders of the nervous system shown by involuntary, jerky movements; especially, of the arms, legs, face, and by ceaseless rapid complex body movements that look well coordinated and purposeful but are, in fact, involuntary and uncontrollable.