Arachnid modeling. Source: University of Manchester
A recent study published by the Paleontological Society describes a new 3D modeling process called Blender. To illustrate its use, Russell Garwood from the University of Manchester and Jason Dunlop from the Natural History Museum in Berlin imaged a trigonotarbid, an early arachnid and one of the first terrestrial predators, using well-preserved fossil evidence prepared in the 1920s and sourced from Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
Garwood and Dunlop describe in their paper, The walking dead: blender as a tool for paleontologists with a case study on extinct arachnids, how they reconstructed the gait of a trigonotarbid, spider-like creatures from a few millimeters to a few centimeters in length. "The trigonotarbid is an alternating tetrapod, meaning there are four feet on the ground at any one time," Dr Garwood told BBC News.
The study also unearthed clues about how trigonotarbids ate; prey was digested pre-orally, in keeping with most arachnids' eating habits, with a digestive enzyme being added to prey items before ingestion. Trigonotarbids did not have spinnerets, and so had to hunt their prey rather than catch them in webs, an evolutionary advantage held by modern spiders.
