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."

Comments

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)

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

Thanks

Re:blah!

[LionKimbro]

Dr David Penney didn't use carbon dating. Carbon dating 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!

[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.