Millions of years ago, when huge dinosaurs stomped the Earth, small, creepy crawlies scurried at their feet. Now researchers have discovered a wonderfully preserved specimen – a tiny centipede frozen in time, enclosed in living amber.
The 8.2-millimeter-diameter beast discovered in Myanmar is so unique that scientists needed to shake up the centipede family tree, giving the traditional arthropod its own suborder. It lived 99 million years ago throughout the Cretaceous period, when mosasaurs swam the seas and tyrannosaurs crawled on land.
The specimen is the primary fossil of a centipede belonging to the order Callipodida discovered and is smaller than its relatives from the identical era. It also sheds light on Callipodida for the primary time, suggesting that this group of arthropods will need to have evolved at the very least 100 million years ago.
The long-legged creature was named Burmanopetalum inexpectatum and was described within the journal ZooKeys. Burmanopetalum refers to Burma (now Burma), where it was found, and inexpectatum is Latin for “unexpected”.
“It was a great surprise to us that this animal could not be placed in the current classification of centipedes,” lead creator Professor Pavel Stoev said in a press release. “Although their overall appearance has remained unchanged over the past 100 million years, as our planet has undergone dramatic changes several times during this era, some morphological features of the Callipodida lineage have evolved significantly.”
To examine the specimen, the researchers used three-dimensional X-ray microscopy, which allowed them to have a look at the centipede’s physical structure in impressive detail. Golden amber allowed it to preserve features that fossils would normally lose.
Surprisingly, the piece of amber through which the specimen was encased actually contained a complete of 529 centipede fossils. However, B. inexpectatum stood out as being the one member of its order on this mixture of millipedes.
“So far, only a dozen species of millipedes have been sampled from your entire Mesozoic era – spanning 185 million years – but latest discoveries about Burmese amber are rapidly changing the image,” said study co-author Dr. Thomas Wesener. “Over the past few years, almost the entire 16 living orders of millipedes have been identified on this 99-million-year-old amber. The beautiful anatomical data presented by Stoev et al. show that Callipodida now joins the club.
“We were lucky to find this specimen so well preserved in amber!” Stoev added.
