This ancient ant and its parasitic companion became locked together in amber about 44 to 49 million year ago . It ’s the oldest know instance of a mite attached to its victim .
It ’s amazing what we ’ve found preserved in amber , from a fossilized scene ofa wanderer attacking a wasp , toa 100 million - yr - old flythat expect like it died yesterday .
A Fossilized Scene of a Spider assault a Wasp , Preserved for 110 Million Years
As for this latest find , it ’s only the second known example of a fossilized soupcon attached to its horde . Nature News explains :
The 0.7 - millimeter - long hint and its dupe are preserved in amber , which is fossilize Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree resin . The tinge looks like firmly tie to the ant ’s head — a behavior also seen in modern parasitic mites of the genus Varroa , which are often mentioned as potential perpetrator in thesudden flop of honeybee colonies .
Although it is difficult to say for indisputable , the ancient tinge was credibly a leech , too , state Jason Dunlop , an arachnologist at the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science in Berlin . “ The gold mite appear very similar to modern tinge , so we presume it had a similar modality of life and was parasitizing the ant rather than attacking it like a shot , ” he says .
In a paper publish on 10 September in Biology Letters , Dunlop and his collaborators key out the hint as belong to the genus Myrmozercon , which includes numerous species still alive today . An air house of cards trapped between the two invertebrates hides some anatomic feature , make it toilsome to name the exact metal money . mite are arachnids , a class of eight - legged arthropods that includes spiders and scorpion .
More atNature newsworthiness .
Amber - PaleontologyScience
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