53 million years ago, a spider got stuck in a blob of amber. Today, scientists are at last dissecting him-- without even touching the amber. David Penney and a team from the University of Manchester in England used Very High Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography (say that ten times fast) to create a full 3-D model of the spider, inside and out.

The ancient beast, in six-way view. Note the internal organs on display in (f).
(Credit: David Penney, University of Manchester.)

The fossilized spider, of a new genus and species called Cenotextricella simoni, was found in the Paris Basin in France.

Penney, a paleo-arachnologist (that's a thing you can be?) said, "[Amber] retains an incredible amount of information, not just about the spiders themselves, but also about the environment in which they lived."