Um, what in the hay-ell is this??? UPDATED!!

Landon and I walked out to get the mail yesterday and on the way back to the front door I saw this.... critter! It has the body of an ant but HUGE and the coloring of a black widow spider. Which if any of you live or have lived around here know that we have tons of those! I was trying to snap pictures of this little guy and he was seriously hauling some butt! That may be why he is not totally clear in the pictures because he was crawling so fast.

I just had to capture him and post these pictures because I have never seen a bug like this before, his size and coloring. Totally weird! I guess you probably can't tell from these pictures but to give you an idea of how big he was, he was about 1 1/2 to 2 inches long!! Eek!


Update: Ok so my mudda sent me an email of what the mystery creature is... cause I was obviously too lazy to look it up!! It's called a Velvet Ant and here is all the info about it. Judging by her ground crawling technique and what the info says, this was a female which are the ones with stingers and no wings. And apparently the sting is VERY painful. No worries though, Landon was safely inside and I could keep my distant thanks to a zooom lens ;)