Unearthing fossils, millions-of-years old, no longer surprise us. Technology makes even the study of such prehistoric fossils easier than what was even a decade back. But, the happening world does not seem to satisfy the scientists with the available technology. And this is well clear by the use of ‘digital wizardry’ to see through the gut of a pinhead-sized 53-million-year-old fossilized spider and that too in 3-D!
With the fossil found preserved in amber, observing the minute features of the tiny specimen would mean cracking into the amber. This would potentially destroy the sample. So, the use of Very High Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography to scan the bug through its amber grave would avoid both the insect’s physical dissection and the destruction of the amber.
The tiny male spider survived during the early Eocene epoch, i.e. from about 55 million to nearly 34 million years ago, representing a new genus and species — Cenotextricella simoni.
This spider belongs to the earliest fossil species of a micro-spiders’ family - named Micropholcommatids. And with amber providing a unique window into past forest ecosystems, this new method of scanning the insect in 3-D helps retain an incredible amount of information — not only about the spiders, but also the environment they lived in millions of years ago.
