Arthropod fossils 230 million years old were discovered encased in amber

As in the movie "Jurassic Park" the amber contains samples of animals. These are not drops of dinosaur blood

As in the movie "Jurassic Park" the amber contains samples of animals. These are not drops of dinosaur blood that were preserved inside an insect that swallowed them, but only in the insects themselves. In the current case of arthropods preserved in amber: a fly and a mite are more than 100 million years older than the previous amber examples.

An international team of scientists discovered the oldest examples of arthropods - a family that includes insects, spiders and crustaceans - preserved in amber.

The remains - of one fly and two mites were discovered in a drop of amber with a diameter of one millimeter in northeastern Italy, their age is estimated to be about 100 million years older than any other insect specimen discovered in amber so far and in general. The group's findings, published on August 27 in the journal PNAS, pave the way for a better understanding of the evolution of one of the most diverse groups of organisms in our world.

"Amber is an essential tool for paleontologists because it preserves remains at a microscopic resolution and allows us to provide a better estimate of the amount of evolutionary changes over millions of years," says one of the partners in the study, David Grimaldi from the Zoology Division of the American Museum of Natural History and the world authority in regards to preserved arthropod and insect fossils in amber

Solidification of resin known as amber. So far, amber samples have been discovered starting from the coal age (from 340 million years ago) to about 40 thousand years ago. It is produced by a wide variety of plants from Shulamite hairs to fruit trees, but mainly by conifers. Although arthropods appeared over 400 million years ago, so far, the oldest fossilized individual is 130 million years old. The arthropods that have now been discovered break the age record and bring it to 230 million years. This is where amber samples from the Tertiary era are concerned.

The amber drops, most of them 2-6 millimeters in length, were found high up in the Dolomite Alps in northeastern Italy by Yagneo Ragazzi and Guido Rugi from the University of Padua. A group of German scientists led by Alexander Schmidt from the Georg August University in Göttingen scanned about 70 such drops in order to find remains of animals or plants and in the end the researchers found these three samples of the arthropods. Grimneldi and a colleague from France studied these insects in collaboration with researchers from the Canadian Department of Agriculture.

Two of the samples were of mites and they were called Triasacarus fedelei and Ampezzoa triassica. These are the oldest specimens of a group known as Eriophyoidea which includes about 3,500 living species today. They all feed on plants and form growths called galls. Interestingly, these mites bear a surprising resemblance to those of today. They fed on the leaves of the tree which eventually got trapped in the amber it produced - a needle tree from an extinct family. Today 97% of mites feed on fruit trees, the two specimens discovered lived before the rapid spread of flowering fruit trees.

The third insect - a fly, cannot be identified because its body parts were not well preserved, but now that the researchers have proven that it is possible to find fossils of insects trapped in amber from the Tertiary period, they will look for more examples.

"During the Tertiary era, enormous changes occurred in the vegetation and the variety of animals because it was immediately after the greatest mass extinction in history - at the end of the Permian," said Grimaldi. "It was an important period in which many things can be learned about the development of life and evolution." saying.

to the notice of the researchers