August 6, 2009—It was every spider for itself in the brutal pre-dinosaur world of the Carboniferous period,new 3-D images reveal.
About 359 to 299 million years ago, Earth teemed with newly evolved insects and hungry amphibians that had just crawled onto land.
Among them were two coin-size, spiderlike creatures—Cryptomartus hindi (pictured above at left) andEophrynus prestvicii (right)—which scurried along the bottoms of the world's first rain forests.
Fossils of the bugs had already given scientists some insights into their lives: E. prestvicii, for instance, had long legs that probably allowed it to run through leaf litter after its prey
