Scientists Find Oldest Arthropods Preserved in Amber
Posted on August 27, 2012
An international team of scientists has discovered the oldest record of arthropods preserved in amber. The Triassic specimens include one fly and two mites. They are about 100 million years older than any other amber arthropod ever collected. They are the first arthropods to be found in amber from the Triassic Period. The amber droplets, most between 2-6 millimeters long, were foound buried in outcrops high in the Dolomite Alps of northeastern Italy. The findings were published here in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
David Grimaldi, an author of the research paper and a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Invertebrate Zoology, says, "Amber is an extremely valuable tool for paleontologists because it preserves specimens with microscopic fidelity, allowing uniquely accurate estimates of the amount of evolutionary change over millions of years."
About 70,000 of the miniscule droplets were screened for inclusions - encased animal and plant material - by a team of German scientists led by Alexander Schmidt, of Georg-August University, Gottingen. This resulted in the discovery of the three arthropods. The tiny arthropods were studied by Grimaldi and Evert Lindquist, an expert on gall mites at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Ottawa. Two of the specimens (pictured below) are new species of mites, named Triasacarus fedelei and Ampezzoa triassica. They are the oldest fossils in an extremely specialized group called Eriophyoidea that has about 3,500 living species, all of which feed on plants and sometimes form abnormal growth called "galls." The ancient gall mites are surprisingly similar to ones seen today.
Grimaldi says, "You would think that by going back to the Triassic you'd find a transitional form of gall mite, but no. Even 230 million years ago, all of the distinguishing features of this family were there - a long, segmented body; only two pairs of legs instead of the usual four found in mites; unique feather claws, and mouthparts."
The third amber specimen, a fly, cannot be identified because, outside of the insect's antennae, its body parts were not well preserved. The researchers hope to find more specimens now that they have shown that amber preserved Triassic arthropods.
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