  We develop an idea of Evans and O'Connell, Englander and Pinsky and Duquesne
and Winkel by giving a pathwise construction of the so called `backbone'
decomposition for supercritical superprocesses. Our results also complement a
related result for critical $(1+\beta)$-superprocesses given in Etheridge and
Williams \cite{EW}. Our approach takes an analytical point of view which is
more in the spirit of the original Evans and O'Connell paper.
