Researchers Produce 3D Images of Prehistoric Mite Hitching a Ride on a Spider

Posted on November 9, 2011

University of Manchester researchers have scanned a tiny mite hitching the ride on the back of a 50-million-year-old spider. The researchers and colleagues in Berlin believe the mite, trapped inside Baltic amber, is the smallest arthropod fossil ever to be scanned using X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning techniques.

The tiny mite is just 176 micrometers long. It is barely visible to the naked eye.

Dr David Penney, one of the study's authors, says, "CT allowed us to digitally dissect the mite off the spider in order to reveal the important features on the underside of the mite required for identification. The specimen, which is extremely rare in the fossil record, is potentially the oldest record of the living family Histiostomatidae."

Dr Jason Dunlop, from the Humboldt University, Berlin, says, "As everyone knows, mites are usually very small animals, and even living ones are difficult to work with. Fossil mites are especially rare and the particular group to which this remarkable new amber specimen belongs has only been found a handful of times in the fossil record. Yet thanks to these new techniques, we could identify numerous important features as if we were looking at a modern animal under the scanning electron microscope. Work like this is breaking down the barriers between palaeontology and zoology even further."

The results of the study were published here, on 11-9-2011, in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.