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.














Comments (1)
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.
Posted by: Ken Clark | October 30, 2007 5:18 PM