Paleontologists find a whole Cretaceous crab in amber from Myanmar
An international team of scientists studied a 99 million-year-old Cretaceous crab found in amber from northern Myanmar. These are the oldest so-called real crabs ever found. It forces scientists to reconsider some ideas about the evolution of these creatures and postpones the time when crabs first crawled out onto land by 25-50 million years ago, according to an article published in the journal Science Advances.
As noted, the body of a crab with a size of only five millimeters has been completely preserved; experts examined it using microcomputer tomography.
According to paleontologists, this is the most complete crab fossil ever found. At the same time, specialists can carefully examine any part of the body. The new species was named Cretapsara athanata, it contains the designation of the period when he lived, as well as the name of the immortal spirit of clouds and waters, indicating a habitat in Southeast Asia.
True crabs belong to the infraorder of the Brachyura decapod crustaceans, they must be distinguished from the “false crabs”, which have similar features that have repeatedly appeared in crustaceans in the course of evolution: for example, porcelain crabs or Kamchatka crabs with reduced limbs.
According to scientists, real crabs independently conquered land and freshwater bodies 12 times, but did so much later than other groups of arthropods. Despite the fact that C. athanata shows a striking resemblance to modern coastal crabs, it only has gills and no respiratory organs in atmospheric air. This suggests that the crab led a semi-aquatic lifestyle. This is unusual, as most of the crab fossils found in amber are tree-dwelling crabs.
Recall that in the summer, scientists from France and the United States discovered a species of parasitic fungus previously unknown to science. Its remains were found in a piece of amber. And in the spring, Chinese scientists discovered an ancient pollinator beetle that lived in the days of the dinosaurs. His body was preserved in a piece of amber from Myanmar.
