A spider’s web encased in a piece of amber found by two brothers on an East Sussex beach has been confirmed as the oldest known to science.

Analysis of the prehistoric filaments, which were discovered last December by Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks near Bexhill-on-Sea, has revealed that they were spun about 140 million years ago when dinosaurs walked the Earth.

The threads were woven by a predecessor of modern orb-weaving spiders, the common garden variety, according to research by scientists at the University of Oxford. Details of the study are published today in the Journal of the Geological Society.

Professor Martin Brasier, who led the research, said: “These spiders are distinctive and leave little sticky droplets along the threads to trap prey. We actually have the sticky droplets preserved within the amber.

“These turn out to be the earliest webs that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record to our knowledge. You can match the details of the spider’s web with the spider’s web in my garden.”

As well as threads of spider’s web, which are each a millimetre long and joined together, the amber also includes plant matter, insect droppings and ancient microbes. Among the contents are the earliest evidence yet of actinobacteria, which break down wood and resin into soil particles, a discovery which will shed light on the evolution of soil.

The web was reconstructed using a technique called confocal microscopy, in which the amber was studied from 40 positions and reassembled on a computer.

“It is a very exciting time to be a palaeontologist,” Professor Brasier said. “We are able to view things and see detail in ways that we’ve never been able to before. It’s part of a larger project which is yielding rich rewards. There’s still a lot more to find, and we have even more exciting things to report in the near future.”

Jamie Hiscocks told the BBC at the time of the discovery last year: “Most of the pieces are actually just lying there on the surface. You pick it up, just bend down and pick it up. I couldn’t believe it because we’d actually said the week before at a meeting we had had, ‘What would you like to find? What would your most precious find be,’ and I said, ‘A spider’s web would be fantastic’.”

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