Tiny Rare Fossil Found in 16 Million-Year-Old Amber is 'Once-in-a-Generation' Find
upstart writes:
Tiny rare fossil found in 16 million-year-old amber is 'once-in-a-generation' find:
Hiding in plain sight, the third-ever tardigrade[*] fossil on record has been found suspended within a piece of 16-million-year-old Dominican amber.
The find includes a newly named species, Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus, as a relative of the modern living family of tardigrades known as Isohypsibioidea. It's the first tardigrade fossil from the Cenozoic, our current geological era that began 66 million years ago.
The study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
[*] Tardigrade:
Tardigrades (/trdred/), known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals.
They have been found everywhere in Earth's biosphere, from mountaintops to the deep sea and mud volcanoes, and from tropical rainforests to the Antarctic. Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions-such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation-that would quickly kill most other known forms of life. Tardigrades have survived exposure to outer space.
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