20 Million Year Old Spider Found

evil agent writes "BBC News is reporting that Paleontologist Dr. David Penny has found a spider, and two droplets of blood, perfectly perserved in amber. He was able to extract the blood and determine its age: 20 million years old. Since it is thought to be the first time that spider blood has been found perserved in amber, it is hoped that DNA could be extracted."

Re:Time Travel

[allanc]

...

Wouldn't the time-related changes *be* his results?

Re:blah!

[LordoftheWoods]

Well in that case, its definately 20 million years old. Because... uhm... we can carbon date stuff thats not dead yet. Thats how they figured out what the 'normal' amount of C-14 was.

Interesting...

[Kranfer]

For some reason I am hearing the Jurassic Park sound track playing... wait, I am playing it.

I think that this is awesome. I saw a special on the Discovery Channel called "Raising the Mammoth" where they went out into Siberia looking for a frozen Mammouth in the snow and such to get DNA and clone one using a Elephant from India as a Surrogate...

My only concern is... if we do get into cloning extinct animals and insects, what effect will it have on the ecosystem? Also is it possible to do at the present time?

But map that DNA :)

OK - /. summary is wrong

[AngryElmo]

Nothing is mentioned about using DNA (in fact i'm not even sure if it would be preserved for that amount of time). Also I don't know where the "two dropllets" of blood comes from - the scientist has been using "droplets" which could be any number larger than one... Picky aren't I? :) The find is seriously cool though..

Re:Worried soul here!

[vmaxxxed]

Hello Mr. BogaBoga

Your concerns are valid. There is the small chance that previously extinct bacteria might be trapped there. Though, I would not be that worried. First, this is not an alien, and what ever is there has been here before. Secondly, its 20,000,000 years old, though preserved in amber in form, it, and all bacteria with it, is certainly dead. Actually, I would be surprised if they can find a complete set of DNA. It's probably all in pieces.

Now, about the AIDS theory... AIDS is probably the most studied virus, and most scientists in the world, not only in the US, believe that this is a retrovirus that passed from monkeys to humans somewhere in Africa, about a hundred years ago. Actually, the origin of the two common HIV strains has been narrowed to specific species of African monkeys. The origin of HIV-2 has been established to be the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys), an Old World monkey of Guinea Bissau, Gabon, and Cameroon. The origin of HIV-1 is a chimpanzee subspecies: Pan troglodytes troglodytes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_origin [wikipedia.org])

If you are going to present such an extreme theory, it must be supported with extreme evidence.

Thanks

Re:blah!

[LnxAddct]

A) 20 millions years isn't that old, its 100 times older than humans, big deal. Thats why the form hasn't changed that much, but it may also be because the design really is that well. Most spiders have few predators but quite a selection of prey.

B) Some animals did evolve to what is considered pretty optimal, some examples being sharks, crocidiles and squid. If you follow the genetic chains of living things you'll see that some tend to have fewer changes. Often times the case is that the animal has few or none predators.

Regards,
Steve

Re:blah!

[LionKimbro]

Dr David Penney didn't use carbon dating. Carbon dating [wikipedia.org] only works to roughly 60,000 years ago. Beyond that, the radioactivity of the little C-14 that remains falls can't be told from background radiation.

I don't know what technique was used to date the spider; The article only says they used the blood in the spider to do it.

Re: blah!

[Black Parrot]

> Funny how this 20 million year old spider species exists in identical form today. It must be a perfectly adapted design; why else would it not have changed in all that time?

TFA mentions that it's a new species. I.e., not identical to any known spider.

(Presumably "new species" means "newly discovered", since the specimen is rather old.)

Blood... In a spider?!?

[bigmanjq]

You are correct, especially about your second point. As a Biology teacher, I emphasize the point to my students that spiders (and all arthropods) do NOT have blood (that term is reserved for animals with a closed circulatory system). Spiders and other arthropods have a fluid called "hemolymph" (as you mentioned) which contains the equivalent of our blood plus lymphatic fluids (hense the name "hemo"=blood + "lymph").

Do you actually expect any more from BBC News, though?

Re:is it just me

[chigun]

I just read an article about these new "B" movies on Sci-Fi network. Aparrently they have around 30 in the can for the year and they do very well (relatively). Each one has a very low budget (I think I read 1 million), and given that SciFi is one of the more popular networks on cable right now, I'm sure they make that money back quite handily and then some.

Personally, I think it's great that they're bringing back the cheesy sci-fi movies. That means we might have a MST4K one day.

Any carbon date is technically "years before 1950"

[jpellino]

The baseline concentration of carbon 14 is from a 1950 measurement - C14 is atmospheric nitrogen bombarded by naturally occurring radiation, the C14 is incorporated metabolically into living organisms - but only as long as you're alive and respiring.

As to accuracy, there are calibration curves for it against other known counters - tree rings etc.

As to precision, there was also a recalculation of the half-life - but they were only off by a few percent.

They're not off by an integral factor, they're not off by an order of magnitude. But after ten or so half-lifes, the differences become too small to be practically useful.

Journal Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Abstract from the paper

Note that this was submitted and accepted more than a year ago. If you have a subsciption (most universities), you can get it at this url [blackwell-synergy.com]

Abstract: Two spiders (Filistatidae) in Miocene Dominican
Republic amber, one newly identified and only the second
known fossil of this family, have autospasized legs (detached
at a predetermined locus of weakness when restrained by a
non-self-induced source) at the patella-tibia joint. In both
specimens, droplets of haemolymph (blood) are preserved
exiting the patellae. The autospasized legs and the presence
of haemolymph suggests that both spiders were engulfed in
rapid-flowing resin seeps of relatively low viscosity, rather
than having wandered onto a sticky exudate, becoming stuck
and then covered by a subsequent resin flow. These are the
first reported incidences of such fossilized blood droplets, the
shape, size and position of which provide clues to preservational
taphonomy, an understanding of which is necessary
for reliable conclusions concerning fossil communities and
ecosystems. In addition, haemolymph droplets may serve as
reservoirs for fossil DNA.
Key words: Dominican Republic, spider, Araneae, Filistatidae,
haemolymph, autospasy.

Re:is it just me

[qwerty shrdlu]

Actually CGI is cheaper than even poor acting, casting, and writing. Unless there's some point in doing it well.

Re:blah!

[ultranova]

Well in that case, its definately 20 million years old. Because... uhm... we can carbon date stuff thats not dead yet.

No we can't. Carbon dating tries to determine how long something has been dead from the ratio of radioactive versus stable carbon in its tissues; it is assumed that as long as the thing lived, it exchanged carbon freely with the surroundings (getting into its tissues tiny amounts of radioactive carbon produced in the upper atmosphere among the stable isotope), and when it died, this exchange stopped, leading to the radioactive isotope being depleted from those its tissues through radioactive decay.

In any case, Wikipedia claims that carbon dating can only be used to measure times some 60 000 years back, so this seems rather irrelevant for the discussion at hand.

Re:blah!

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're claiming that all spider species currently alive have been discovered?

Jackass.

I'm pretty sure that's not what he was claiming. It's just generally accepted that in the absence of evidence that a species currently exists, we assume that it does not. Every now and then we're proven wrong when a species that was thought to be extinct turns up somewhere, but that doesn't happen all that often. Since this is a species that currently, as far as we know, only exists in a lump of amber, we assume that it is extinct. It's possible that we'll be proven wrong at some point, but it's not likely.

Re:blah!

[jafiwam]

Also note;

Even sub-optimal biological systems can not-change for a long time under these and other conditions;

- adaptions prevent or correct mutations
- long lifespan
- many breeding partners over a wide area
- no predators (like sharks)
- stable environment in the relevant parts (sharks that I know of do not specialize in foods for example)
- large population

So it isn't suprising that some animals don't change much over time.

ps. WTF is it with the ID people spreading from Fark to here... I figured that Slashdot had somewhat of a higher standard.