Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Gotcha!

This is a piece of amber about 100 million years old. Think about the odds of the tree sap imprisoning both these creatures at this exact moment. Fantastic. This is a gotcha on at least two levels, spider catches wasp, we capture both. I was thinking that there's no real analog to this sort of thing for humans. The closest, I would think, would be those poor souls at Pompei who were entombed in lava, but even there the connection is tenuous.

Spider capturing a wasp . . . 97 to 110 million years ago
"What makes this find so sensationally rare, aside from the fact that the amber clearly shows a snapshot of the spider moving in on the wasp, is the fact that the piece contains 15 unbroken strands of ancient spider silk within (the wasp actually sits captured in several strands)."

According to the story on CNet, both these genera are extinct, but their modern day counterparts are still at work doing the same things.

3 comments:

karen lindsey said...

truly amazing....sort of breathtaking.....

karen lindsey said...

truly amazing

Unknown said...

Karen! You're still here. I thought you had abandoned me. Glad to see you.