14 DAY TRIAL // English researchers have recently announced that they managed to discover the oldest spiderweb ever to be included in the fossil record. University of Oxford paleontologist Martin Brasier was the lead researcher of a new investigations team that analyzed the pieces of amber found in Sussex, England. The investigators determined that liquid resin trapped inside a spiderweb was laid some 140 million years ago, alongside ancient microbes, plant matter and other artifacts, LiveScience reports.
“These turn out to be the earliest webs that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record to our knowledge,” Brasier says. According to botanists, the viscous tree sap must have oozed from the tree's bark, and then flow over the spider web, before hardening for millions of years. The structure of the web was thus very well preserved, and contributes to advancing scientists' knowledge about the ancestors of the modern arthropods. In order to do that, the English team resorted to some pretty advanced pieces of technology.
To visualize the structure of the spider web, as well as the way in which the silk threads were interwoven, the experts used a computer technique known as confocal microscopy that essentially allowed them to reconstruct the webs in their entirety. According to preliminary analysis results, it may be that the spiders that wove the webs were closely related to the orb-web garden spiders that we still have around today. Some believe the modern species may have even descended from the “ancestor” whose web was just found.
“These spiders are distinctive and leave little sticky droplets along the spider web threads to trap prey. We actually have the sticky droplets preserved within the amber,” Brasier explains. “I would guess, from the form of the web, that it was feeding on flying insects like flies and the ancestors of bees, wasps and moths,” the expert adds. The new piece of amber yields a record breaker. The recently found web is about 4 million years older than another amber-preserved web, estimated in 2006 to be about 136 million years old.