Since the success of the Jurassic Park film series, it has been common knowledge that insects from the age of dinosaurs may be found remarkably well preserved in amber, which is definitely fossilized tree resin.
The animal fauna preserved in Cretaceous amber from Burma (Burma) is especially diverse. Over the past few years, the nearly 100-million-year-old amber has revealed several spectacular discoveries, including dinosaur feathers, a whole dinosaur tail, unknown groups of spiders and several other long-extinct groups of insects.
However, only three species of centipedes preserved in Burmese amber were discovered before the research of Thomas Wesener and his PhD student Leif Moritz on the Museum of Zoological Research. Alexander Koenig – Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity (ZFMK). Their research was recently published in an open-access journal Checklist.
After identifying over 450 millipedes preserved in Burmese amber, scientists confirmed the existence of species representing as many as 13 of the 16 major orders circling the Earth today. The oldest known fossils of half of those orders were found inside the examined amber.
The researchers performed the evaluation using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). This scanning technology uses omnidirectional X-rays to create a three-dimensional image of the specimen, which might then be virtually faraway from the amber and examined digitally.
The examined amber comes mostly from private collections, including the most important European one, owned by Patrick Müller from Käshofen. It is believed that there are various additional scientifically vital specimens, even perhaps 1000’s, currently unavailable in private collections in China.
Over the subsequent few years, the newly discovered specimens will likely be fastidiously described and in comparison with existing species to find out what morphological changes have occurred during the last 100 million years and determine speciation events within the centipede Tree of Life. As a result, science will finally begin to look to unravel long-standing puzzles, corresponding to whether the local diversity of centipedes in Italy’s southern Alps or on the island of Madagascar is the results of evolutionary processes that occurred one, ten, or greater than 100 million years ago.
According to scientists, most Cretaceous millipedes present in amber don’t differ significantly from species found today in Southeast Asia, which indicates the antiquity of existing millipede lines.
On the opposite hand, the variety of the various orders appears to have modified dramatically. For example, throughout the age of dinosaurs, the Colobognatha group – millipedes characterised by unusual elongated heads that evolved to suck liquid food – were quite common. In contrast, there are currently over 12,000 species of centipedes and only 500 species of centipedes.
Another interesting discovery was the invention of newly hatched eight-legged juveniles, which indicated that these animals lived and bred in resin-producing trees.
“Even before the looks of arachnids and insects, and well before the primary vertebrates, litter-eating millipedes were the primary animals to go away their mark on land, over 400 million years ago,” the scientists explain. “These early millipedes were quite different from those alive today – they were often much larger, and plenty of had very large eyes.”
For example, larger species of the genus Arthropleura grew as much as 2 m (6.5 ft) long and 50-80 cm (2-3 ft) wide – the most important arthropods to ever crawl on Earth. Why these giants became extinct and other orders survived stays unknown, partly because only a couple of typically poorly preserved fossils have been found from your complete Mesozoic era (252–66 million years ago). Similarly, even though it had long been suspected that the 16 modern orders of centipedes should be very ancient, there was a scarcity of fossil record to support this assumption.
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