Posted by Mo on October 30, 2007 European reseasrchers, led by David Penny of the University of Manchester, have used a medical imaging technique called Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography to digitally dissect and reconstruct a 1mm-long 53 million-year-old spider that is preserved in a piece of amber.
The pictures, and some links, are below.
Read more at ScienceDaily and the BBC, and see this post for more about the amazing arachnids.
almost makes me wish I had preferred paleontology instead of petrology 
incredible tools at hand. I remember many years ago, some researchers using x-ray tomography to study pyrite preserved fossils in a fine grained shale, the morphology of many different animals that lived in/on the mud was preserved, and on a lucky occasions, internal features would come out in the tomographs, NOTHING like this though, fascinating.
October 30, 2007