A VENOMOUS spider with camouflage so convincing that it's "almost impossible" to see has left experts dazzled.
The arachnid revealed itself to hiker Sarah Jolly deep in the Australian bush when it moved while she and her friends were building a rock wall.
It was so well camouflaged, that when she pointed it out to her friend, Tricia Stack, Sarah had to convince her it wasn't just a stick.
"They called me to come over with the phone camera," Tricia, 67, said. "When I got there it was still and sitting on a rock."
"I even said to her, 'it is not a spider - it looks like a stick.'
"She and her husband were there and they said 'look closely, it has legs'."
It was only when Tricia looked closely at a photo of the scene that she spotted the arachnid's legs outlined with its body.
In Tricia's images, the spider appears to be no more than a snapped-off branch.
It's a type of camouflage that even has the experts amazed.
Dr Lizzy Lowe from Macquarie University said the spider was an orb-weaver, most likely of the acroaspis genus.
The arachnids are venomous but rarely bite. The bite and injected venom is comparable to that of a bee sting.
Orb-weavers are known to imitate twigs to avoid predation, but Dr Lowe said she had "never seen any quite like this one".
"They're very good at it, I find them almost impossible to see unless they move," she said.
"I've never seen one with a top like a broken-off twig before."
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The spider was encountered in the Australian bush, roughly six miles outside of Torrington, a small village in New South Wales.
Tricia is grateful for the one-of-a-kind encounter.
"When the legs were seen I was blown away," she said. "I knew it was something special."
"I just feel so privileged to have seen such a thing."
In other news, a Brit tourist recently spotted a “half-spider, half-scorpion” scurrying along the floor.
Spiders are reportedly getting angrier as a result of an evolutionary trick to survive extreme weather conditions.
This terrifying flying spider slingshots its enemies at speeds 100 times faster than a cheetah.
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