Male Furrow Spider
I found this fairly substantial spider scrunched up in the flowerbuds of a plant growing beside the road on July 7, 2025. I think the plant was a tansy, which we have a lot of.
Once I got him home, I managed to get him unscrunched so we can better see what he looks like:
He’s definitely male, because he has the enormous pedipalps that male spiders typically have.
Searching through the pictures on BugGuide, he looks like one of the Furrow Spiders, specifically Larinioides patagiatus
These are fairly common spiders, and spin an orb-type web. Wikipedia says that Larinioides_patagiatus is found pretty much all around the Northern Hemisphere, and nobody is saying anything about them having been carried around by humans, so they probably spread on their own.
The genus Larinioides is referred to on some sites (like bugguide) as Furrow Spiders, while others (like Wikipedia) refer to them as Flying Spiders. Given their extremely wide distribution, though, I suspect that they are some of the spiders that disperse themselves by ballooning – running out a thread of silk until the wind catches it, and then letting it carry them away.
I had to hunt a bit to find an explanation for why they are called Furrow Spiders, and the only explanation I found was that the pattern on the side of the abdomen looks like a furrow in a freshly plowed field. https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/furrow-orbweavers