CE 21: 30 Million Year Old Spiders

Amber Reveals Ecology Of 30 Million Year Old Spiders

"Scientists at The University of Manchester and the Manchester Metropolitan University have carried out the first comparative scientific study of ancient spiders trapped in amber more than 30 millions years ago."

By studying fossilized spiders scientists are able to find things out about spiders dating back to the Cenozoic period. "This is the first time ancient spiders from different parts of the world have been compared on such a large scale." The reason that finding the spiders in amber is so important is that amber not only preserves the spiders themselves, but also parts and information about the area and environments in which they lived.

By studying a spiders from 30 million years ago, scientists are able to study their evolution from then until now, and are also able to possibly, with their comparison skills, predict what they will look like and act like in the future. Because there were 671 spiders compared in the study, they found that the web-spinning spiders found in the Baltic amber were much larger than those in the Dominican amber, but the hunting spiders showed no difference in size. The reasoning? Perhaps the fauna.

In finding the amber, scientists were also able to determine that the amber was "trapping the organisms uniformly."