The Old Shit Of Britain

The land of the Queen is all up in old crap lately.

First, the tiny tangled threads of the world's oldest spider web have been found encased in a prehistoric piece of amber. A paleobiologist said the 140-million-year-old webbing provides evidence that arachnids had been ensnaring their prey in silky nets since the dinosaur age and confirmed the strands were linked to each other in the roughly circular pattern familiar to gardeners the world over.

The web was found in a small piece of amber picked up by an amateur fossil-hunter scouring the beaches on England's south coast about two years ago. A microscope revealed the existence of tiny threads about 1 millimeter long amid bits of burnt sap and fossilized vegetable matter. An earlier find in Lebanon was dated to 130 million years ago.

In more recent chronology, archaeologists have unearthed an ancient skull with an unusually well-preserved brain, calculating the gray matter was more than 2,000 years old, and the oldest ever discovered in Britain.

The skull was severed from its owner sometime before the Roman invasion of Britain and found in a muddy pit during a dig in northern England this fall. It was realized the skull might contain a brain when something was felt moving inside the cranium as it was being cleaned. Obsevation through the skull's base and spotted an unusual yellow substance inside, which scans confirmed as the presence of brain tissue. It is unclear just how much of the brain had survived, since the tissue apparently contracted over the years, but parts of the brain have been tentatively identified. The existence of a brain where no other soft tissues have survived is extremely rare.

What can science do with these finds? Very little, but now we how there have been spiders and brains for as long as we suspected!