Thanks to a well-preserved fossil of an ancient arachnid that lived about 410 million years ago, a team of scientists has recreated the way it would have walked when it was alive.

According to BBC News, the trigonotarbid, as it is called, was one of the Earth's first land predators. The arachnid would have been able to run down and jump flightless insects and other invertebrates for its prey.

The team of scientists was fortunate enough to examine a fossil so pristine, they could see the individual leg joints, allowing for recreation. The result is a high-definition video of a 3-D rendering of the trigonotarbid.

"We know quite a bit about how it lived," Russell Garwood, a palaeontologist with the University of Manchester in the U.K., told BBC News. "We can see from its mouth parts that it pre-orally digested its prey - something that most arachnids do - because it has a special filtering plate in its mouth. So, that makes us fairly sure it vomited digestive enzymes on to its prey and then sucked up liquid food."

The multi-institutional team published their work in the Journal of Paleontology. Study co-author Jason Dunlop, of the Natural History Museum in Berlin, said the fossil they examined was a rare find for its condition.

"These [trigonotarbid] fossils are unusually well preserved. During my PhD, I could build up a pretty good idea of their appearance in life," he told BBC News. "This new study has gone further and shows us how they probably walked. For me, what's really exciting here is that scientists themselves can make these animations now, without needing the technical wizardry (and immense costs) of a Jurassic-Park style film. When I started working on fossil arachnids, we were happy if we could manage a sketch of what they used to look like. Now, they run across our computer screens."

The fossils came from a collection at the Natural History Museum in London that had been sliced into ultra-fine pieces, like those of an X-ray CAT scan.

"Between each part of the leg, there are darker pieces where they join, and that allowed us to work out the range of movement," Garwood said. "We then compared that with the gaits of modern spiders, which are probably a good analogy because they have similar leg proportions. The software enabled us to see the center of mass and find a gait that worked. If it's too far back compared to the legs, the posterior drags on the ground. The trigonotarbid is an alternating tetrapod, meaning there are four feet on the ground at any one time."