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 (/ˈtɑːrdɪɡreɪd/), 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.
(Score: 3, Touché) by HammeredGlass on Wednesday October 06 2021, @10:52PM
A little amber plus 16 million years should be easy for one of your kind. Your modern cousins would have made a better showing of it after such a short time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @11:45PM
which uses this 16 million year old Ripper to connect to the ancient mycelial spore network that not only sends the ship flipping out of CGI scenes with dizzying flip flop maneuvers but our gay crew will now cross the boundaries of time to spread LGBTQ everywhere for millions of years!
Just imagine!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @12:04AM (2 children)
Is this the evolutionary origin of retard strength? Please sensitive types, if you object to the word retard I suggest you look at the world around you and shhhhhut the fuck up.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @12:12AM
It's from the Latin "retardare" which means "Let's go Brandon"!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 07 2021, @04:21PM
It's the modern version of Samson and Delilah. You merely need to dig up all the fossilized waterbears to rob them of their might! Get to work, you slacker!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @07:47AM
The family would be Isohypsibiidae.