Arachnid fossils have been making the news lately. On October 26th, the journal Zootaxa described scanning a fossil spider using “Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography.” This is the first time that the technique has been used to generate images of a fossil preserved in amber. The technique apparently improves on a technique previously only available at the University of Texas.

The spider is a new species of the family Micropholcommatidae, a group not found in North America. The authors of the paper, David Penney of the University of Manchester and others from Ghent University in Belgium, dubbed the species Cenotextricella simoni. The fossil is 53 million years old and was found in the Paris Basin region of France.

See the Zootaxa abstract or the stories at Science Daily and BBC News for more information.