A spider in the Himalayas wears the same red smiling face as Hawaii's famous happy-face spider - and its DNA marks it as a new species, not the Hawaiian one long thought to wear that grin alone

Researchers in Uttarakhand described a new spider, Theridion himalayana, carrying the red-and-black smile that made Hawaii's happy-face spider famous. A gene barcode sets it about 8.5 percent apart from the Hawaiian species, enough to call it its own lineage. Whether the two arrived at the same face by chance or inherited it from a shared ancestor is the question the discovery leaves open. On the underside of a leaf more than two kilometers up in the mountains of Uttarakhand, a tiny spider carries a bright smile on its back. Two dark dots for eyes, a red curve for a mouth, the whole cartoon face painted across its abdomen. It is the sa... [6145 chars]