Her corpse, preserved alongside her offspring in amber for 99 million years, is the oldest physical evidence for maternal care in spiders, says Paul Selden, an invertebrate paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. This fossil is one of four showing that some ancient spiders guarded their egg sacs and may even have raised their young, Selden and his colleagues report September 15 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. While the study “unequivocally” shows that these spiders were guarding their egg sacs during the mid-Cretaceous, “future researchers need to keep their eyes open for females with larger and older offspring,” says Linda Rayor, an entomologist at Cornell University who studies maternal care in spiders.