Remarkable fossil of a spider attack 100 million years ago.
The only known fossil of a spider attacking prey caught in its web has been found. The approximately 100 million year old interaction was a moment captured like a picture when the sap from a tree encased the spider and a parasitic wasp that it was about to eat. The sap then fossilized into amber and was uncovered by researchers from Oregon State University. The oldest spider web fossil dates back about 130 million years ago, but this is the first time that the fossil of a spider about to eat its prey has been discovered.
The way they were preserved in amber might remind you of Jurassic Park, where scientists took dinosaur DNA from a preserved mosquito to clone dinosaurs and bring them back to life. Scientists have shown that this method of reincarnation is not likely to work. Researchers from Murdoch University in Western Australia found that hereditary material, like DNA, probably wouldn’t last longer than 6 point 8 million years, and most of the dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago.
