The world’s oldest known spider web has been discovered on a beach in Sussex, England, trapped inside an ancient chunk of amber.

Scientists found the rare amber fossil in December, and have now confirmed that it contains remnants of spider silk spun more than 140 million years ago by an ancestor of modern orb-weaving spiders. After slicing the amber into thin sections and examining each piece under a high-powered microscope, the researchers discovered that the ancient silk threads share several features common to modern spider webs, including droplets of sticky glue used to hold the web together and capture prey.

“Silk is a relatively delicate material and it is rarely preserved in the fossil record, except when entombed in amber,” the scientists wrote in a paper about the discovery, published in the upcoming December issue of the Journal of the Geological Society. The researchers think pieces of organic material, including the spider silk, became embalmed during a severe wildfire, when amber resins seeped out from the charred bark of coniferous trees and were