{"id":790,"date":"2003-08-19T04:15:39","date_gmt":"2003-08-19T04:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=790"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:20","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:20","slug":"oldest-spider-silk-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=790","title":{"rendered":"oldest spider silk found"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Do you think the ancient cobwebs hanging in your  attic are old? Well, Samuel Zschokke of the University of Basel in  Switzerland has you beat. Zschokke reports in the Aug. 7 <em>Nature<\/em> that he  has found a strand of spider silk preserved in amber that is 130 million  years old. His discovery beats the age of the previously known oldest  spider thread by some 90 million years. The amber contains a single  strand about 4 millimeters, or about a .16 of an inch long and is coated  with sticky glue droplets (presumably to better catch prey) similar to  those produced by many of today&#8217;s spider species. Zschokke writes that  the strand &#8220;shows a striking resemblance to recent araneoid spider  threads.&#8221; (Araneoid spiders spin sticky, intricate orb-webs.) The  specimen gives &#8220;direct evidence for the antiquity&#8221; of sticky spider  silk, though Zschokke cautions, &#8220;the fossil thread could have been part  of a web type that no longer exists today.&#8221; <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 8\/19\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do you think the ancient cobwebs hanging in your attic are old? Well, Samuel Zschokke of the University of Basel in Switzerland has you beat. Zschokke reports in the Aug. 7 Nature that he has found a strand of spider &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=790\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1153,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions\/1153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}