Abstract
The use of viscid silk in aerial webs as a means to capture prey was a key innovation of araneoid spiders and has contributed largely to their ecological success1. Here I describe a single silk thread from a spider's web that bears glue droplets and has been preserved in Lebanese amber from the Early Cretaceous period for about 130 million years. This specimen not only demonstrates the antiquity of viscid silk and of the spider superfamily Araneoidea, but is also some 90 million years older than the oldest viscid spider thread previously reported in Baltic amber from the Eocene epoch2.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Opell, B. D. Funct. Ecol. 12, 613–624 (1998).
Bachofen-Echt, A. Biologia Generalis 10, 179–184 (1934).
Coddington, J. in Spiders: Webs, Behavior, and Evolution (ed. Shear, W. A.) 319–363 (Stanford Univ. Press, California, 1986).
Eskov, K. Neues Jb. Geol. Paläontol. Mh. 1984, 645–653 (1984).
Selden, P. A. Nature 340, 711–713 (1989).
Penney, D. & Selden, P. A. J. Arachnol. 30, 487–493 (2002).
Shear, W. A., Palmer, J. M., Coddington, J. A. & Bonamo, P. M. Science 246, 479–481 (1989).
Schlee, D. & Dietrich, H.-G. Neues Jb. Geol. Paläontol. Mh. 1970, 40–50 (1970).
Opell, B. D. J. Arachnol. 30, 494–502 (2002).
Vollrath, F. et al. Nature 345, 526–528 (1990).
Benjamin, S. P. & Zschokke, S. Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 78, 293–305 (2003).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The author declares no competing financial interests.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zschokke, S. Spider-web silk from the Early Cretaceous. Nature 424, 636–637 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/424636a
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/424636a
- Springer Nature Limited