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Post Info TOPIC: Spiders in Amber
Blobrana


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Beetle in Amber
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A tiny beetle braces itself as a larger insect approaches. Instantly, the beetle releases an irritating chemical from its body just as the hungry invader -- possibly a ****roach -- investigates its would-be meal with a long antenna.
At that moment, a sticky blob of tree resin plops onto the beetle, trapping and preserving it. The predator escapes but loses its antenna to the gooey resin.
The tree resin, which slowly fossilises into amber, freezes the dramatic encounter in time -- for 100 million years.
The beetle, about one-quarter inch long,  was  preserved in a piece of Burmese amber, from the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar.

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Blobrana


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RE: Spiders in Amber
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A Cal Poly microbiology professor known for being the first person to extract an organism from ancient amber is the focus of a forthcoming Discovery Channel documentary.
Its one of three projects that professor Raul Cano recently worked on to bring amber into the spotlight again.
Cano earned widespread recognition in the science world in the 1990s for his research. He also received a $5.6 million research grant from Unocal in 2000.
Last week, director Dan Leavitt shot footage of Cano extracting fossils from 40-million-year- old amber, a form of ancient resin that comes from hardened tree sap.

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Blobrana


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A trapdoor spider with a genus dating back more than 180 million years to the Jurassic dinosaur period has been found in the State’s South-West.
The population of rare and ancient Moggridgea tingle was discovered by accident in the Walpole Wilderness Area, west of Walpole.
The chance find has boosted hopes that more populations of the relic species are in existence.

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Blobrana


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Queensland Amber
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Huge chunks of amber containing the remnants of ancient rainforests have been found along beaches in Far North Queensland, the first amber fossils to be found in Australia.
The amber pieces, some as big as a football, contain flies, beetles, spiders, flowers, fungi, moss, fern spores and pollen as well as bubbles of gas and water from the time, the researchers say.
The fossils are at least 4 million years old, they say, possibly much older.

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Blobrana


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Baltic Amber
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Baltic amber has its origins in thick prehistoric coniferous forests which covered a land mass in the region of modern-day Scandinavia and parts of what is now the Baltic Sea a very distant 40 million years ago. Today we admire resins which oozed from the trunks of these massive prehistoric trees as amber.

Geologists believe an ancient river, which has been termed the Eridan, transported dead tree trunks caked in sticky resin to a sea which was a smaller precursor of the modern Baltic, which itself was formed only 10 000 years ago.
Rich deposits of fossilised tree resin or succinite, better known as Baltic amber, accumulated in the sea along what is now the Baltic coast between the Polish village of Chlapowo and the Sambian peninsula of the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

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Blobrana


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RE: Spiders in Amber
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The oldest-known spider web with prey still entrapped has been found preserved in a chunk of amber in Spain.
The mesh of silk strands snaring the remains of a fly, beetle, mite and wasp, dates back 110 million years to the time of the dinosaurs.
The fossil web appears to have been designed along the same lines as the round nets woven by modern spiders.
The find, described in Science, sheds light on the early evolution of spiders and the insects they fed on.
The web consists of some 26 silk strands preserved in a thin layer of amber together with arachnid prey.

Although it is not intact, enough of the web structure has survived to convince its discovers - from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and the American Museum of Natural History, New York, US - that it was probably a classical wheel-shaped, or orb, web.

It is possibly the oldest spider web on record; an earlier single strand of spider silk preserved in Lebanese amber has been discovered although it is unclear if this was part of a true web.

"The advanced structure of this fossilised web (from Spain), along with the type of prey that the web caught, indicates that spiders have been fishing insects from the air for a very long time" - Dr David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History.

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Blobrana


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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.

The study of fossilised spiders from the Baltic (Poland) and the Dominican (Caribbean) regions has revealed new insights into the ecologies of spiders dating back to the Cenozoic period.
It is the first time ancient spiders from different parts of the world have been compared on such a large scale. 671 species of spiders were compared in the study which is published in the March issue of the Royal Society's Journal Biology Letters.

"Amber provides a unique window into past forest ecosystems. It retains an incredible amount of information, not just about the spiders themselves, but also about the environment in which they lived. We have not only been able to compare the size distributions of over 600 spiders but we have also been able to gain unique insights into the forest in which they lived" - Palaeoarachnologist Dr David Penney, of The University of Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences who led the research.

By analysing the size distributions of the spiders and comparing the distinct hunting traits of each species, Dr Penney found that web-spinning spiders were bigger in Baltic amber than in Dominican amber, but that there was no difference between hunting spiders in either region. It was also found the fauna of the amber producing trees in each region accounted for this difference in size.

"Several lines of evidence show that greater structural complexity of Baltic compared to Dominican amber trees explains the presence of larger web-spinners. The Dominican trees are long, thin and smooth whereas the Baltic trees are wide and bushy, providing a much better environment for web-spinners to prosper" - Dr David Penney.

The study demonstrates for the first time that spiders trapped in amber can be scientifically compared across deep time (30 million years). This is due to the fact that until now it was unknown whether the amber resins were trapping organisms uniformly. This study proves they were.

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