A few years ago, we showed you a strange natural construction found in the Peruvian rainforest Peru. It was an egg case from an unidentified creature. Later, we found out it was a yet-unclassified spider, so the egg case with a fence around it was dubbed Silkhenge. Now we have footage of baby spiders emerging from the egg case.
Entomologists Phil Torres and Aaron Pomerantz watched the spiders emerging. They still haven't found an adult, and attempts to raise the baby spiders failed because their diet is unknown. But the holy grail of this research would be to catch an adult spider building this extraordinary structure. -via Metafilter
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What I gather from the NatGeo article, they tried to raise the babies, but failed. Once they were dead, they had no problem grinding them up.
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Soooo . . . they took one of those baby spiders, ground it up, and extracted its DNA?
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