The biopolymer didn’t just coat the spiders’ bodies — it pickled them.
A clue that this coating might play a role in fossilization came when the researchers, on a whim, placed a spider fossil under a fluorescence microscope. To their surprise, the substance glowed a bright yellow-orange. “It was amazing!” says geologist Alison Olcott of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
The researchers next sought to identify the chemical makeup of the mysterious substance. The orange-yellow glow, the team found, comes from abundant carbon and sulfur in the coating. “That got me thinking about sulfurization,” Olcott says. The arachnids’ preservation might have gone like this: A dead spider, floating in the water column, became covered in the diatoms’ sticky goo. The goo chemically reacted with the spider’s chitin exoskeleton, more or less pickling it and keeping the exoskeleton largely intact and ready for fossilization.
This process of diatom-assisted sulfurization may have been at work in other fossil-rich sites during the Cenozoic Era, Olcott says. That span of time began 66 million years ago, after an asteroid ended the Age of Dinosaurs, and continues to the present day. Before that era, diatoms were not widespread. That didn’t happen until
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