50-Million-Year-Old Spider Dissected

Amber is a beautiful, golden colored resin found along the sea shores of Scandinavia. Vikings traded it and it made its way, through the trade routes, across the world, to the Middle East and even China. It is especially valued for its use in jewelry, but scientists know that it hides ancient secrets beyond its aesthetic properties.

Many ancient species of insects have been preserved in the hardened resin.

As the University of Manchester and Zootaxa Journal report, one scientist, Dr. David Penney, along with scientists from Ghent University, Belgium, has discovered a new species of spider preserved in amber. By enhancing a technique called "very high resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography," or VHR-CT, the spider has been examined to a degree of detail undreamed of before this point. Extremely small fossilized animals can be digitally examined, dissected, to reveal interior structures and organs. This is Dr. Penney's specialty, when he is not off in the African jungles hunting down as yet undiscovered spiders in his "living laboratory."

The newly discovered species is called Cenotextricella simoni. It is very old, about 53 million years, and this specimen happens to be a male. The amber was found in the Paris Basin, in France.

VHR-CT has been the domain of The University of Texas, which specializes in the scans. However, this new effort has improved the technique, and the center of gravity may have shifted to Ghent University. The technique was borrowed from medical applications and tried on amber preserved species. In medicine, it is important in diagnosing diseases, but its ability to look inside of objects is likely, as Dr. Penney says, to "revolutionize" his specialty. Penney's paper, published in Zootaxa, describes this first use of the technique to "digitally dissect a fossil in amber."

The improvement comes in the resolution of the images. The technology has been enhanced by Penney's fellow scientists at the Department of Subatomic Radiation Physics at Ghent University in Belgium. The study of amber fossils will never be the same.

Amber is special because it gives scientists a time capsule from truly ancient periods, preserving small animals and other important details about the environment in which they lived.

Dr. Penney has made a mark on his profession. This year a Mexican researcher and colleague of his discovered a new species of spider deep in a mine. It is 20 million years old. It has been named after Dr. Penney, Episinus penneyi.

The next time you look at your amber ring or necklace, gaze deep inside to see what other treasures it might be hiding.

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