Random Musings of an Ethnic Artist

49 Million-Year-Old Face of Spider Frozen in Amber

The amber fossil — housed in the Berlin Natural History Museum — is a member of a living genus of the Huntsman spiders (Sparassidae), a group of often large, active, free-living spiders that are hardly ever trapped in amber. (See the haunting  3-d animation!)

This is a true Time-traveler!
This is Eusprassus crassipes, a fossil huntsman spider in almost 50 million-year-old Baltic amber (shown in inset), as revealed by modern techniques of X-ray computed tomography.



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