Bizarre creature preserved in 99 million-year-old amber was ‘beyond imagination,’ scientists say
A newly identified parasitic wasp that buzzed and flew among dinosaurs 99 million years ago evolved a bizarre mechanism to snare other creatures and force them to unwittingly shelter its young, according to new research.
Paleontologists studied 16 specimens of the tiny wasp preserved in amber dating back to the Cretaceous period that was previously unearthed in Myanmar. The previously unknown species, now named Sirenobethylus charybdis, had a Venus flytrap-like structure on its abdomen that could have allowed it to trap other insects, the researchers reported Thursday in the journal BMC Biology.
"When I looked at the first specimen, I noticed this expansion at the tip of the abdomen, and I thought this must be an air bubble. It’s quite often you see air bubbles around specimens in amber," said study coauthor Lars Vilhelmsen, пенсионный адвокат a wasp expert and curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
"But then I looked at a few more specimens and then went back to the first one. This was actually part of the animal."
Vilhelmsen and his colleagues from Capital Normal University in Beijing determined the structure was movable because it was preserved in different positions on different specimens.
"Sometimes the lower flap, as we call it, is open, and sometimes it’s closed," Vilhelmsen said. "It was clearly a movable structure and something that was used to grasp something."
The closest comparison found in nature today is the Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with hinged leaves that snap shut when prey flies inside, according to the new study.
"There’s no way you can know how an insect that died 100 million years ago was living. So you look for analogs in modern insect fauna. Do we have anything among wasps or other groups that looks like this?" he said.
"And there’s no real analog within insects. We had to go all the way out of the animal kingdom into the plant kingdom to find something that remotely resembled this."
A newly identified parasitic wasp that buzzed and flew among dinosaurs 99 million years ago evolved a bizarre mechanism to snare other creatures and force them to unwittingly shelter its young, according to new research.
Paleontologists studied 16 specimens of the tiny wasp preserved in amber dating back to the Cretaceous period that was previously unearthed in Myanmar. The previously unknown species, now named Sirenobethylus charybdis, had a Venus flytrap-like structure on its abdomen that could have allowed it to trap other insects, the researchers reported Thursday in the journal BMC Biology.
"When I looked at the first specimen, I noticed this expansion at the tip of the abdomen, and I thought this must be an air bubble. It’s quite often you see air bubbles around specimens in amber," said study coauthor Lars Vilhelmsen, пенсионный адвокат a wasp expert and curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
"But then I looked at a few more specimens and then went back to the first one. This was actually part of the animal."
Vilhelmsen and his colleagues from Capital Normal University in Beijing determined the structure was movable because it was preserved in different positions on different specimens.
"Sometimes the lower flap, as we call it, is open, and sometimes it’s closed," Vilhelmsen said. "It was clearly a movable structure and something that was used to grasp something."
The closest comparison found in nature today is the Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with hinged leaves that snap shut when prey flies inside, according to the new study.
"There’s no way you can know how an insect that died 100 million years ago was living. So you look for analogs in modern insect fauna. Do we have anything among wasps or other groups that looks like this?" he said.
"And there’s no real analog within insects. We had to go all the way out of the animal kingdom into the plant kingdom to find something that remotely resembled this."
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