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.
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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.