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Triassic Mites Join World's Oldest Amber Animal Finds (Pictures)

Rachel Kaufman
Published August 28, 2012


Goldbugs

Images courtesy A. Schmidt, University of Göttingen

Two newfound, 230-million-year-old mites (pictured), along with an extinct insect related to gnats and mosquitoes, are the oldest animals yet found in amber—by more than a hundred million years, a new study says. (Related: "Ancient Praying Mantis Found in Amber [ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080425-amber-mantis.html ].")

Found among 70,000 droplets of amber from northeastern Italy, the arthropods-invertebrates with exoskeletons and segmented bodies—may look like "alien creatures," in the words of study leader David Grimaldi [ http://research.amnh.org/iz/staff/dr-david-grimaldi ]. But, he added, they're remarkably similar to modern gall mites.

One significant difference is that today's gall mites parasitize flowering plants, while the new species lived before flowering plants evolved—hinting at the resilience of the basic mite "design."

"Despite all that evolutionary change—this is a hundred million years before flowering plants; there was no Atlantic Ocean; dinosaurs hadn't evolved—gall mites don't seem to have changed very much," said Grimaldi, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

As for these specific mites, they were probably the architects of their own demise, he said. The resin that ultimately fossilized into amber could have been secreted by a tree after the mites had begun feeding on it—leading Harvard entomologist Brian Farrell to comment, "Live by the sword, die by the sword."

(Also see "Toxic Frogs Get Their Poison From Mites [ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070514-poison-frogs.html ].")

The amber-bugs study [ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/21/1208464109.abstract ] appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [ http://www.pnas.org/ ].


Endless Love?

Photograph by Marc DeVille, Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Two 125-million-year-old dung midges have the dubious honor of being the oldest preserved mating pair in the animal kingdom, according to a 2007 study in the French journal Comptes Rendus Palevol [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/16310683 ]. (Also see "Hundreds of Dino-Era Animals in Amber Revealed by X-Ray [ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080404-amber-animals.html ].")

© 2012 National Geographic Society

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