Tech images 49m-year-old spider

Mother Nature Network.

The breakthrough is particularly revelatory since the spider - a Huntsman spider - is rarely caught in tree resin due to its strength and speed.

Insects, arachnids and other small creatures are commonly caught in tree resin which then becomes amber. While amber fossilises the unlucky critter, it provides scientists with a look at species at different points in history.

“More than 1 000 species of fossil spider have been described, many of them from amber,” says David Penney, from University of Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences, writes Fox News.

Some of the first fossil spiders ever analysed over 150 years ago came from similar fossils, he explains.

“These old, historical amber pieces have reacted with oxygen over time and are now often dark or cracked, making it hard to see the animal specimens inside,” Penney notes.

To work around that, an international team of fossil and living spiders experts used modern computer analysis to study the fossil.

CT scanning was originally a medical imaging technique but in the past few years it has helped paleontologists gain unprecedented insight into how ancient creatures lived, states New Scientist.

Thanks to recent improvements, the technique can now penetrate dense fossils using more energetic X-rays and also produce high-resolution models.

Its ability to resolve the internal structures of fossils has been one of the most groundbreaking applications; for example this 3D model reveals the optic lobes of a fish brain.