Samplings: February 2008

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Scans show, from left to right, a fossil spider from below, from the back, and in lateral section.

The University of Manchester/Ghent University

Examining the guts of fossil spiders millions of years old sounds far-fetched, but a technique originally developed for medical diagnostics has been repurposed to do just that—and with strikingly clear results.

Like a medical CAT scan, Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography, or VHR-CT, works by taking X-ray images along multiple axes. A computer collates the images to depict the specimen both inside and out. David Penney of the University of Manchester in England and a team of colleagues in Belgium applied VHR-CT to a 53-million-year-old male spider encased in amber that had been discovered in France. In spite of the spider’s small size—less than a twentieth of an inch long—Penney and his team could subject it to a “digital dissection.” He easily identified the spider’s taxonomic family as one with living members and recognized that it was a species new to science, which he named Cenotextricella simoni.

VHR-CT leaves specimens intact, even as it reveals internal organs and structures, and it can “see” through amber more clearly than lower-tech light microscopy can. Those are substantial advances for the study of minute fossils. (Zootoxa)