Spider and prey frozen in Cretaceous action shot

Joanna Carver, reporter

(Image: Oregon State University)

Remember the amber-encased mosquitoes in Jurassic Park that symbolised the hope, or maybe the peril, that comes of digging up the past? Well, the man who inspired that movie has now given us a 100-million-year-old amber fossil with a freeze-frame surprise inside: a spider poised to attack a wasp caught in its web.

This kind of action shot has never been seen in a fossil before, though amber has also preserved other insects and even mammalian hair for millions of years.

"This was a male wasp that suddenly found itself trapped in a spider web," says George Poinar at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who has studied the find. "This was the wasp's worst nightmare, and it never ended. The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them."

It was Poinar's previous research into extracting and sequencing dinosaur DNA from amber-trapped insects that inspired Michael Crichton to write Jurassic Park.

That's a little terrifying, but the fossil is also imbued with the spirit of friendship, or at least non-cannibalism. It's the oldest evidence of social behaviour in spiders, the researchers say. The fossil contains another male spider in the same web, which is strange because even now spiders tend to be cannibal loners.

Some might say the Jurassic franchise has run out of steam - time for an ancient arachnid buddy movie?

Journal reference: Historical Biology, DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2011.640399

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/24489c87/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C10A0Cspider0Eand0Eprey0Efrozen0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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