A tardigrade in Dominican amber

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2021

Abstract

Tardigrades are a diverse group of charismatic microscopic invertebrates that are best known for their ability to survive extreme conditions. Despite their long evolutionary history and global distribution in both aquatic and terrestrial environments, the tardigrade fossil record is exceedingly sparse. Molecular clocks estimate that tardigrades diverged from other panarthropod lineages before the Cambrian, but only two definitive crown-group representatives have been described to date, both from Cretaceous fossil deposits in North America. Here, we report a third fossil tardigrade from Miocene age Dominican amber. Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus gen. et sp. nov. is the first unambiguous fossil representative of the diverse superfamily Isohypsibioidea, as well as the first tardigrade fossil described from the Cenozoic. We propose that the patchy tardigrade fossil record can be explained by the preferential preservation of these microinvertebrates as amber inclusions, coupled with the scarcity of fossiliferous amber deposits before the Cretaceous.

Identifier

85117847762 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.1760

e-ISSN

14712954

ISSN

09628452

PubMed ID

34610770

Issue

1960

Volume

288

Fund Ref

Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung

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