Arthropods In Amber

[ramonmercado]

A fight to death, preserved for 99 million years.

Fossil captures ancient ‘hell ant’ in action
By Lucy Hicks Aug. 6, 2020 , 11:00 AM

A new fossil reveals how a mysterious ancient insect captured its meals.

The discovery depicts a 99-million-year-old encounter between a “hell ant,” one of the earliest known ants, and its prey, an extinct relative of the cockroach. Preserved in amber, the ant, less than half the length of a dime, grasps the victim’s neck between two sharp mandibles and a hornlike protrusion on its head (pictured left, illustrated right).

The find highlights hell ants’ strange anatomy. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/fossil-captures-ancient-hell-ant-action

 

[ramonmercado]

Mom frozen in time looking after her brood.

Long before Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth, sap engulfed a spider guarding her egg sac.

Her corpse, preserved alongside her offspring in amber for 99 million years, is the oldest physical evidence for maternal care in spiders, says Paul Selden, an invertebrate paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. This fossil is one of four showing that some ancient spiders guarded their egg sacs and may even have raised their young, Seldon and his colleagues report September 15 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Maternal care, such as guarding eggs, is common among modern spiders. Some species even go so far as nursing their young (SN: 10/29/18) or serving themselves up as their children’s first meal (SN: 4/21/15). Because maternal care is so widespread, researchers suspected that spiders developed this behavior long before the Cretaceous Period, which began around 145 million years ago.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/oldest-fossil-evidence-amber-spider-mom-care-young

 

[EnolaGaia]

Analysis of a Cretaceous cockroach trapped in amber indicates cockroaches were more ecologically and behaviorally diverse than they are today.

Creepy, big-eyed cockroach discovered trapped in amber from 100 million years ago

Today's cockroaches are nocturnal creepy crawlers that scatter when you turn on the light. But their ancient relatives were likely the polar opposite, according to the discovery of an immaculately preserved, big-eyed cockroach trapped in amber.

Its huge peepers likely helped it forage during the day, when the sun was blazing overhead.

Researchers already knew about the existence of this unique, now-extinct cockroach, scientifically known as Huablattula hui, but this is the first time that they've gotten such a detailed look at its eyes. ...

They examined the eyes by using microscopy and photography, but the minuscule structures of the antennae required an even higher-resolution approach; a technique called thin-sectioning, which involved making slices of the amber that were only 200 micrometers wide, just wider than a human hair.

These techniques revealed a cockroach with a sensory world mostly unknown to the roaches in modern basements. Typically, modern cockroaches have underdeveloped eyes, but feel around through highly sensitive touch sensors on their antennae. In contrast, this ancient species had well-developed compound eyes, while at the same time having a fraction of the antennae touch sensors that its modern relatives have. ...

Based on these sensory structures, it's likely that this ancient critter behaved more like modern-day mantises, a close roach relative that is active during the daytime ...

The finding suggests that roaches may have been much more ecologically diverse in the past than they are today. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/cretaceous-cockroach-exceptional-eyes

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT: https://rdcu.be/cGGWU

 

[ramonmercado]

An ancient song.

An extraordinary insect preserved in amber is opening our ears to a world of communication beyond our hearing. New research on an extinct katydid in the Natural History Museum's collection reveals that katydids have been using ultrasounds for millions of years to try and avoid predators hearing them.

The song and hearing range of the cricket-like insect has been discovered tens of millions of years after its death.

After being trapped in amber for 44 million years, new scans of Eomortoniellus handlirschi have allowed scientists to reconstruct the katydid's mating call. It reveals the earliest known animal to communicate at frequencies far beyond the range of human hearing.

While not quite as high as some living katydids, its call's pitch would have been above the hearing of most mammals. Only a select group of mammals, including the first bats, were tuning into its call, as part of the opening salvos of an evolutionary arms race which continues today. ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-insect-amber-reveals-evolutionary-ancient.html