Prehistoric Spider Web Found In Amber

A spider web that is more than one hundred million years old has been found encased in amber. The spider that spun the web lived during the cretaceous period in what is now Lebanon. The spider responsible for the fossilized web lived during the same time period as the dinosaurs.

A spider biologist, Samuel Zschokke, claims that the recent find is the oldest spider web on record, and before this fossil was found, experts were not exactly sure if spider web building dated as far back as 130 million years ago. Fossils of spiders are among the most rare, and there are very few web fossils on record.

Spiders do not fossilize well because their bodies are too soft to leave an impression on sediment. And they are not found near bodies of water that often, so spiders do not hang around high-sediment areas that could serve to preserve them. So you can imagine how big of a deal it is to find a web that dates back to the dinosaur era.

Have you ever found a fossil of any kind while exploring outdoors?