Rare lizard fossil preserved in amber - via Herp Digest

Date: February 27, 2020

Source: University of Bonn

The tiny forefoot of a lizard of the genus Anolis was trapped in amber about 15 to 20 million years ago. Every detail of this rare fossil is visible under the microscope. But the seemingly very good condition is deceptive: The bone is largely decomposed and chemically transformed, very little of the original structure remains. The results, which are now presented in the journal PLOS ONE, provide important clues as to what exactly happens during fossilization.

How do fossils stay preserved for millions of years? Rapid embedding is an important prerequisite for protecting the organisms from access by scavengers, for example. Decomposition by microorganisms can for instance be prevented by extreme aridity. In addition, the original substance is gradually replaced by minerals. The pressure from the sediment on top of the fossil ensures that the fossil is solidified. "That's the theory," says Jonas Barthel, a doctoral student at the Institute for Geosciences at the University of Bonn. "How exactly fossilization proceeds is currently the subject of intensive scientific investigation."

Amber is considered an excellent preservative. Small animals can be enclosed in a drop of tree resin that hardens over time. A team of geoscientists from the University of Bonn has now examined an unusual find from the Dominican Republic: The tiny forefoot of a lizard of the genus Anolis is enclosed in a piece of amber only about two cubic centimeters in size. Anolis species still exist today.

Vertebrate inclusions in amber are very rare

The Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History has entrusted the exhibit to the paleontologists of the University of Bonn for examination. "Vertebrate inclusions in amber are very rare, the majority are insect fossils," says Barthel. The scientists used the opportunity to investigate the fossilization of the seemingly very well preserved vertebrate fragment. Since 2018 there is a joint research project of the University of Bonn with the German Research Foundation, which contributes to the understanding of fossilization using experimental and analytical approaches. The present study was also conducted within the framework of this project.

The researchers had thin sections prepared for microscopy at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology at the University of Bonn. The claws and toes are very clearly visible in the honey-brown amber mass, almost as if the tree resin had only recently dripped onto them -- yet the tiny foot is about 15 to 20 million years old.

Scans in the micro-computer tomograph of the Institute for Geosciences revealed that the forefoot was broken in two places. One of the fractures is surrounded by a slight swelling. "This is an indication that the lizard had perhaps been injured by a predator," says Barthel. The other fracture happened after the fossil was embedded -- exactly at the place where a small crack runs through the amber.

Amber did not protect from environmental influences

The analysis of a thin section of bone tissue using Raman spectroscopy revealed the state of the bone tissue. The mineral hydroxyapatite in the bone had been transformed into fluoroapatite by the penetration of fluorine. Barthel: "This is surprising, because we assumed that the surrounding amber largely protects the fossil from environmental influences." However, the small crack may have encouraged chemical transformation by allowing mineral-rich solutions to find their way in. In addition, Raman spectroscopy shows that collagen, the bone's elastic component, had largely degraded. Despite the seemingly very good state of preservation, there was actually very little left of the original tissue structure.

"We have to expect that at least in amber from the Dominican Republic, macromolecules are no longer detectable," says the supervisor of the study, Prof. Dr. Jes Rust from the Institute for Geosciences. It was not possible to detect more complex molecules such as proteins, but final analyses are still pending. The degradation processes in this amber deposit are therefore very advanced, and there is very little left of the original substance.

Acids in tree resin attack bone

Amber is normally considered an ideal preservative: Due to the tree resin, we have important insights into the insect world of millions of years. But in the lizard's bone tissue, the resin might even have accelerated the degradation processes: Acids in the tree secretion have probably attacked the apatite in the bone -- similar to tooth decay.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Bonn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. H. Jonas Barthel, Denis Fougerouse, Thorsten Geisler, Jes Rust. Fluoridation of a lizard bone embedded in Dominican amber suggests open-system behavior. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (2): e0228843 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228843

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Prehistoric frogs in amber surface after 99 million years

By Helen BriggsBBC News

14 June 2018

Frogs trapped in amber for 99 million years are giving a glimpse of a lost world.

The tiny creatures have been preserved in sticky tree resin since the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs.

The four fossils give a window into a world when frogs and toads were evolving in the rainforests.

Amber from Myanmar, containing skin, scales, fur, feathers or even whole creatures, is regarded as a treasure trove by palaeontologists.

Dr Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences in Beijing said it was a "miracle" find.

"In China, frogs, lizards and scorpions are called three treasures of amber," he told BBC News.

"These amber fossils provide direct evidence that frogs inhabited wet tropical forests before the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous."

The fossil record of the earliest amphibians is sparse, which makes the discovery particularly valuable for science.

Dr David Blackburn of the University of Florida, who worked on the fossils alongside Dr Xing, said being small and living in a tropical forest makes the likelihood of ending up in the fossil record "pretty low".

"Frogs have been around on earth for approximately 200 million years," he said.

Read on  

Spider-like creature with a tail found preserved in 100 million year old amber

Finding gives palaeontologists insight into evolutionary history of arachnids

Josh Gabbatiss Science Correspondent 

A spider-like creature with a tail has been discovered trapped in amber from Myanmar.

The arachnid – a relative of modern spiders and scorpions – shares many similarities with modern spiders including fangs and spinnerets, which are appendages used to spin silk.

Unusually, this 100 million year-old creature also has a long, tail-like structure known as a flagellum on its rear end.

“Any sort of flagelliform appendage tends to be like an antenna,” said Dr Paul Selden, a palaeontologist at the University of Kansas and one of the authors of the paper describing the creature.

“It’s for sensing the environment. Animals that have a long whippy tail tend to have it for sensory purposes.”

The discovery, described in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, has been named Chimerarachne yingi after the chimera of Greek mythology - a monster made up of different animal body parts.

Continued  

Frozen in Time: Ancient, Long-Fingered Lizard Trapped in Amber

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | September 11, 2017 11:40am ET

In a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes, researchers are trying to figure out exactly when and where in the world a long-fingered lizard got trapped in the sticky sap of a tree.

Over time, that sap, or tree resin turned into amber, preserving the lizard's remains, including its textured skin. This unique lizard-amber block somehow came into the possession of a man who donated it to the Miller Museum of Geology at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, in the 1980s, but the man didn't report the artifact's age or provenance.

"The man who donated it died, unfortunately," said Ellen Handyside, an undergraduate student studying geological engineering at Queen's University, who is leading the research into the amber-encased lizard. "We are really starting from scratch" in determining its history, she said. [In Photos: Amber Preserves Cretaceous Lizards]

Read on 

Extinct E.T.? Alien-Like Insect Found Trapped in Amber

By Jeanna Bryner, Live Science Managing Editor | January 27, 2017 07:03am ET

The 100-million-year-old remains of an alien-looking female insect — complete with a triangular head and bulging eyes — have been discovered encased in a glob of hardened resin called amber.

The tiny creature, now called Aethiocarenus burmanicus, did not land on Earth via spaceship, but rather lived in what are now mines in Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, the researchers said. There, hiding out in the miniscule cracks in tree bark, the insect may have hunted for mites, worms or fungi, the researchers added. Nearby, dinosaurs would have lumbered by, the scientists who discovered these remains said.

In fact, the extinct "extraterrestrial" was so different from other insects that its discoverers have created an entirely new order, called Aethiocarenodea, for the creature. An order is a scientific classification for organisms that is broader than a genus and family.

"This insect has a number of features that just don't match those of any other insect species that I know," study researcher George Poinar Jr., an emeritus professor of entomology at Oregon State University, said in a statement. "I had never really seen anything like it. It appears to be unique in the insect world, and after considerable discussion, we decided it had to take its place in a new order."

This new order brings the number of known orders of insects up to 32, Poinar added in the statement.

"The strangest thing about this insect is that the head looked so much like the way aliens are often portrayed," Poinar said. "With its long neck, big eyes and strange oblong head, I thought it resembled E.T. I even made a Halloween mask that resembled the head of this insect. But when I wore the mask when trick-or-treaters came by, it scared the little kids so much I took it off."

 

Continued 

'Beautiful' dinosaur tail found preserved in amber

By Paul Rincon

8 December 2016

The tail of a feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar.

The one-of-a-kind discovery helps put flesh on the bones of these extinct creatures, opening a new window on the biology of a group that dominated Earth for more than 160 million years.

Examination of the specimen suggests the tail was chestnut brown on top and white on its underside.

The tail is described in the journal Current Biology.

"This is the first time we've found dinosaur material preserved in amber," co-author Ryan McKellar, of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told the BBC News website.

The study's first author, Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, discovered the remarkable fossil at an amber market in Myitkina, Myanmar.

The 99-million-year-old amber had already been polished for jewellery and the seller had thought it was plant material. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be the tail of a feathered dinosaur about the size of a sparrow.

Lida Xing was able to establish where it had come from by tracking down the amber miner who had originally dug out the specimen.

Dr McKellar said examination of the tail's anatomy showed it definitely belonged to a feathered dinosaur and not an ancient bird.

 

Continued 

99-million year old lizards trapped in amber give us a glimpse into a ‘lost world’

MARCH 5, 2016

by Chuck Bednar

These tiny ancient lizards found well-preserved in amber provide a glance at what life would have been like nearly 100 million years ago, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History and Sam Houston State University explained in a newly-published study.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Science Advances, lead author and SHSU professor Juan Diego Daza and his colleagues revealed that they discovered 12 of the pint-sized reptiles entombed in amber within a private collection of stones donated to the American Museum of Natural History by their previous owner.

According to Smithsonian.com, the lizards were caught in the resin of ancient coniferous trees some 99 million years ago, where they have remained until present day. Originally discovered several decades ago in the mines of Burma, many of the creatures remain in exceptional shape, the study authors noted, with their claws, bones, scales and toe pads all still intact.

 “The fossilized amber provides a view into a lost world, revealing that the tropics of the Mid-Cretaceous contained a diverse lizard fauna,” co-author Dr Edward Stanley, a researcher at the museum, told BBC News. He and his fellow researchers added that they plan to use CT scan to “digitally dissect” the lizards without damaging the amber.

Chameleon ‘missing link’ among the reptiles discovered

Two of the fossils are relatives of modern-day geckos and chameleons, the British news outlet said, and will help provide insight into what the Daza and Stanley are calling a “lost world” by revealing how reptilian features such as adhesive toe-pads originally evolved.

Others died out completely and have no modern-day equivalent, they added, and one lizard is what appears to be a transitional form between a “traditional” lizard and a chameleon, Stanley told BBC News. This so-called “missing link” is “roughly 80 million years older than the next oldest chameleon fossil,” he added, and shows that the chameleon’s projectile tongue evolved early on in its history – before it evolved fused toes to climb on branches.

Read more at 

Salamander fossil found in amber is all kinds of cool

AUGUST 19, 2015

by John Hopton

A fossil of a salamander found in the Caribbean and encased in amber is causing excitement for several reasons, Discovery News reported.

This discovery made scientists giggly 20-30 million years after its death, because 1) It is the first salamander ever to be found encased in amber, 2) It proves that salamanders once lived in the Caribbean, and 3) It is evidence of a species (now extinct) which was previously unknown.

Scientists from Oregon State University (OSU) and the University of California at Berkeley were working in an amber mine in a mountainous region between Puerto Plata and Santiago in Dominican Republic when they found the specimen.

"There are very few salamander fossils of any type, and no one has ever found a salamander preserved in amber," said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus in the OSU College of Science. "And finding it in Dominican amber was especially unexpected, because today no salamanders, even living ones, have ever been found in that region."

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Paleodiversity, have named the creature Palaeoplethodon hispaniolae.

Read more at

Secrets of dinosaur ecology found in fragile amber

Date:

October 20, 2014

Source:

Geological Society of America

Summary:

Ryan McKellar’s research sounds like it was plucked from Jurassic Park: he studies pieces of amber found buried with dinosaur skeletons. But rather than re-creating dinosaurs, he uses the tiny pieces of fossilized tree resin to study the world in which the now-extinct behemoths lived. New techniques for investigating very tiny pieces of fragile amber buried in dinosaur bonebeds could close the gaps in knowledge about the ecology of the dinosaurs.

Continued ...

New Grasshopper Species Discovered In Amber Collected 50 Years Ago

July 31, 2014

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

While searching through a massive collection of 20 million-year-old amber originally discovered in the Dominican Republic some five decades ago, researchers from the Illinois Natural History Survey made a surprising discovery: a new species of miniature grasshopper that is no larger than a rose thorn.

According to Rachel Feltman of The Washington Post, the creature was named Electrotettix attenboroughi in honor of famed naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, and it was housed in one small piece of a 160-pound collection of amber that had been sitting, all but forgotten, in a five-gallon drum.

While modern relatives of the creature have no wings, the newly discovered grasshopper (which belongs to the family Tetrigidae and is also known as a pygmy locust) possesses vestigial wings, Sam Heads, a paleontologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, told Feltman. While he said he “wouldn’t exactly call it a missing link,” he noted that the creature is “an interesting intermediate between a fully winged ancestor and a wingless descendent.”

Heads and his colleagues believe that Electrotettix attenboroughi is believed to have lived between 18 and 20 million years ago, and consumed a diet comprised primarily of moss, algae and fungi. It was discovered in an amber fragment that also contained wasps, ants, midges, plant remnants and fungi, which reveals much about both the physiological needs of the creature and habitat in which it lived.

While Feltman said that the pygmy locust is the first published discovery from the Illinois Natural History Survey team, Heads is confident that several more are on the way. Likewise, co-author and laboratory technician Jared Thomas noted the amber will take several years to get through, and that there’s no telling what they might discover.

“Grasshoppers are very rare in amber and this specimen is extraordinarily well-preserved,” Heads said in a statement, explaining that he creature’s name was chosen because Attenborough “has a personal interest in amber” and because he was “one of my childhood heroes and still is one of my heroes and so I decided to name the species in his honor – with his permission of course.”

Read more at

Amber discovery indicates Lyme disease is older than human race

Date:

May 29, 2014

Source:

Oregon State University

Summary:

Lyme disease is a stealthy, often misdiagnosed disease that was only recognized about 40 years ago, but new discoveries of ticks fossilized in amber show that the bacteria which cause it may have been lurking around for 15 million years -- long before any humans walked on Earth. The findings were made by researchers who studied 15-20 million-year-old amber from the Dominican Republic that offer the oldest fossil evidence ever found of Borrelia, a type of spirochete-like bacteria that to this day causes Lyme disease.

Continued

Tiny Critter Hitchhiked on Mayflies, Fossil Reveals

Creatures about the size of a grain of salt could apparently ride winged insects by using prehensile antennas, researchers say.

This discovery, based on fossils trapped in amber, suggest the descendants of these microscopic beasts might still hitchhike flights today to spread around the globe, scientists added.

Investigators analyzed 16-million-year-old chunks of amber unearthed by amber miners in the Dominican Republic in 2008. Amber is fossilized tree resin, and before it hardened, this ooze often dripped over bugs and other wildlife perched on its tree's bark, entombing them for up to more than 200 million years.

Read more:  http://www.livescience.com/24062-amber-fossil-hitchhiking-insects.html

100-Million-Year-Old Spider Attack Found in Amber

Researchers have found trapped in amber a rare dinosaur-age scene of a spider attacking a wasp caught in its web.

The piece of amber, which contains 15 intact strands of spider silk, provides the first fossil evidence of such an assault, the researchers said. It was excavated in a Burmese mine and dates back to the Early Cretaceous, between 97 million and 110 million years ago.

"This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it," George Poinar, Jr., a zoology professor at Oregon State University, said in a statement.

Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/23796-spider-attack-found-in-amber.html

Prehistoric bugs from 230 million years ago found in amber (Update)

(Phys.org)—An international team of scientists has discovered the oldest record of arthropods—invertebrate animals that include insects, arachnids, and crustaceans—preserved in amber. The specimens, one fly and two mites found in millimeter-scale droplets of amber from northeastern Italy, are about 100 million years older than any other amber arthropod ever collected. The group's findings, which are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pave the way for a better evolutionary understanding of the most diverse group of organisms in the world.


"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," said corresponding author David Grimaldi, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Invertebrate Zoology and a world authority on amber and fossil arthropods. Globules of fossilized resin are typically called amber. Amber ranges in age from the Carboniferous (about 340 million years ago) to about 40,000 years ago, and has been produced by myriad plants, from tree ferns to flowering trees, but predominantly by conifers. Even though arthropods are more than 400 million years old, until now, the oldest record of the animals in amber dates to about 130 million years. The newly discovered arthropods break that mold with an age of 230 million years. They are the first arthropods to be found in amber from the Triassic Period.

Continued:   http://phys.org/news/2012-08-prehistoric-bugs-million-years.html 

With massive dinosaurs towering above, tiny female insects called thrips had just dusted themselves with hundreds of pollen grains from a gingko tree more than 100 million years ago when they perished, only to be preserved in tree resin called amber.

The discovery, detailed this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the oldest known record of insect pollination.

(Pollination occurs when either the wind or an animal, mostly insects, deliver pollen from a plant's male reproductive organ to the female parts either on the same plant or another one.)

During the lower Cretaceous Period when the newly discovered thrips lived, flowering plants would have just started to diversify, eventually replacing conifers as the dominant species, the researchers said.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/20304-amber-insects-oldest-pollination.html

Ancient Fungi-Plant Duo Discovered in Amber

A walnut-size piece of amber from 52-million years ago reveals what scientists say is the oldest, tight-knit partnership between a fungus and a tropical tree.

An international team of scientists from the United States, Germany and India discovered the rare fossil in the Tadkeshwar Lignite Mine of Gujarat State, western India.

Such symbiotic partnerships (which benefit both parties) as the one preserved inside amber, or plant resin, have made possible the survival of most land plants today, the researchers note. The fungi have threadlike cells that increase the surface area of the plant's roots, increasing the plant's access to necessary nutrients from the soil. In return, the fungus gets sugary foods that the plant produces. This fungus-plant root partnership is called a micorrhizal relationship.

"Mycorrhizal relationships are believed to have arisen more than 400-million years ago, as plants began to colonize terrestrial habitats," Paul Nascimbene, of the American Museum of Natural History's division of invertebrate zoology, said in a statement. "They are seen as a key innovation in the evolution of vascular plants."


Read more here ...

Prehistoric Mite Caught Hitching A Ride On A Spider

Scientists have produced amazing three-dimensional images of a prehistoric mite as it hitched a ride on the back of a 50 million-year-old spider.

At just 176 micrometers long and barely visible to the naked eye, University of Manchester researchers and colleagues in Berlin believe the mite, trapped inside Baltic amber (fossil tree resin), is the smallest arthropod fossil ever to be scanned using X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning techniques.

They say their study – published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters on Wednesday, 9 November – also sets a minimum age of almost 50 million years for the evolution among these mites of phoretic, or hitchhiking, behavior using another animal species.

“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,” said Dr David Penney, one of the study’s authors based in the Faculty of Life Sciences. “The specimen, which is extremely rare in the fossil record, is potentially the oldest record of the living family Histiostomatidae.

“Amber is a remarkable repository of ecological associations within the fossil record. In many cases organisms died instantaneously and were preserved with lifelike fidelity, still enacting their behavior immediately prior to their unexpected demise. We often refer to this as ‘frozen behavior’ or palaeoethology and such examples can tell us a great deal about interactions in ecosystems of the past. However, most amber fossils consist of individual insects or several insects together but without unequivocal demonstrable evidence of direct interaction. The remarkable specimen we describe in this paper is the kind of find that occurs only once in say a hundred thousand specimens.”

Fellow Manchester biologist Dr Richard Preziosi said: “Phoresy is where one organism uses another animal of a different species for transportation to a new environment. Such behavior is common in several different groups today. The study of fossils such as the one we described can provide important clues as to how far back in geological time such behaviors evolved. The fact that we now have technology that was unavailable just a few years ago means we can now use a multidisciplinary approach to extract the most information possible from such tiny and awkwardly positioned fossils, which previously would have yielded little or no substantial scientific data.”

Read more ...

Tree Resin Captures Evolution of Feathers On Dinosaurs and Birds

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2011) — Secrets from the age of the dinosaurs are usually revealed by fossilized bones, but a University of Alberta research team has turned up a treasure trove of Cretaceous feathers trapped in tree resin. The resin turned to resilient amber, preserving some 80 million-year-old protofeathers, possibly from non-avian dinosaurs, as well as plumage that is very similar to modern birds, including those that can swim under water.

U of A paleontology graduate student Ryan McKellar discovered a wide range of feathers among the vast amber collections at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in southern Alberta. This material stems from Canada's most famous amber deposit, near Grassy Lake in southwestern Alberta.

The discovery of the 11 feather specimens is described as the richest amber feather find from the late Cretaceous period. The amber preserves microscopic detail of the feathers and even their pigment or colour. McKellar describes the colours as typically ranging from brown to black.

No dinosaur or avian fossils were found in direct association with the amber feather specimens, but McKellar says comparison between the amber and fossilized feathers found in rock strongly suggest that some of the Grassy Lake specimens are from dinosaurs. The non-avian dinosaur evidence points to small theropods as the source of the feathers.

Some of the feather specimens with modern features are very similar to those of modern birds like the Grebe, which are able to swim underwater. The feathers can take on water giving the bird the ballast required to dive more effectively.

McKellar says the Grassy Lake find demonstrates that numerous evolutionary stages of feathers were present in the late Cretaceous period and that plumage served a range of functions in both dinosaurs and birds.

The U of A team's research was published September 15, in the journal Science.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110915131559.htm

50-Million-Year-Old Insect Trove Found in Indian Amber

That’s what’s researchers expected, anyway, but not what they found in the amber, described October 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Instead, the insects resemble what’s seen in amber deposits from continental landmasses of the time. (Amber is the geological name for fossilized tree resin, which often preserves insects that get stuck in it.) The findings suggest an unexpected transfer of insects, perhaps across chains of volcanic islands.

Although the new amber didn’t yield bizarre new species, it’s still loaded with fossil treasures. More than 700 insect species representing 55 families of insects have been identified inside. Among them are ancient bees, termites and ants — highly social insects that form some of the world’s most complex societies.

In the years to come, scientists will compare these ancient specimens to modern forms and develop a deeper understanding of how these creatures have evolved. Until they do, the bugs are plenty amazing to look at.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/indian-amber-insects/


By Brandon Keim