Micro-CT data from: Maternal care in mid-Cretaceous lagonomegopid spiders

This dataset contains the raw Micro-CT data and a 3D CT reconstruction of a piece of Burmese amber CNU009432 from "Guo, X., Selden, P. and Ren, D. (2021) Maternal care in mid-Cretaceous lagonomegopid spiders. Proc. R. Soc. B.". These data shows the maternal care behaviour of an adult female lagonomegopid spider guarding her egg sac. Maternal care benefits the survival and fitness of offspring often at a cost to the mother's future reproduction and has evolved repeatedly throughout the animal kingdom. In extant spider species, this behaviour is very common and has different levels and diverse forms. However, evidence of maternal care in fossil spiders is quite rare. In this study,we describe four Mid-Cretaceous (approx. 99 Ma) amber specimens from northern Myanmar with an adult female, part of an egg sac and some spiderlings of the extinct family Lagonomegopidae preserved, which suggest that adult lagonomegopid females probably built and then guarded egg sacs in their retreats or nests, and the hatched spiderlings may have stayed together with their mother for some time. The newfossils represent early evidence of maternal care in fossil spiders, and enhance our understanding of the evolution of this behaviour.