MOST flies blundering into a spider’s web are soon eaten up. But not the one trapped in the world’s oldest web.
David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History in New York has found a piece of web – complete with its captured prey – preserved in 110-million-year-old amber (Science, vol 312, p 1761). The web was trapped as sap oozed from a tree in what is now Spain. Grimaldi says the fragments are consistent with them being from an orb web. “It’s a geometrically complex web, certainly not a random assortment of strands like a cobweb,” he says.
This…
