A US study made the discovery by looking at fossil evidence, "Apparently, spiders have been fishing insects from the earth for a very long time," said study co-author David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History in Science magazine.
The discovery ends the debate over who was the original web spinner - the Deinopidea or the Araneoida groups. Fossil evidence, including a 110- million year old piece of amber from Spain which shows several entangled insects and droplets of web "glue", shows that the two groups have the same evolutionary origin.
And the find even indicates that spiders prompted the evolution of some flying insects by becoming so adept at snagging their prey. "A lot of people had said over the years that the orb web was a pinnacle of adoptive design," said researcher Jessica Garb of University of California, Riverside.
"Our work confirms that not only is this web type very old, it was also lost in certain lineage of spiders," said Garb.