Throughout its lifetime practically 100 million years in the past, a newfound parasitic worm doubtless made its residence within the bellies of fish. So how one ended up preserved in amber, fossilized tree resin, has paleontologists scratching their heads.
Unearthed in northern Myanmar, the worm has a number of options that intently resemble these of contemporary tapeworms in shark intestines, paleontologist Cihang Luo and colleagues report March 22 in Geology.
Luo’s workforce had been inspecting amber collected from merchants in Myanmar, discovering principally bugs and roundworms trapped inside, when the researchers got here throughout a “strange-looking fossil,” says Luo, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China. This 10-millimeter-long threadlike specimen appeared flatter than typical roundworms. Observations underneath a microscope revealed armor, tentacles and hooklets that regarded larger than, however nonetheless much like, the tentacles of contemporary flatworms that infest sharks and rays.
Scientists have beforehand discovered flatworm eggs preserved in 270-million-year-old fossilized shark dung (SN: 6/5/01). Resulting from flatworms’ small, gentle our bodies and transient life cycles, “discovering physique fossils is exceedingly uncommon,” Luo says.
The fossil, says taphonomist Raymond Rogers of Macalester School in St. Paul, Minn., “is an distinctive preservation and a puzzle for individuals to unravel.”
The unusual discovering is “very onerous to elucidate as a result of there will not be a number of sharks dwelling in timber,” jokes paleontologist Kenneth De Baets of the College of Warsaw in Poland. “It’s like successful the lottery — one in one million.”
Maybe a scavenger feasting on a beached shark carcass picked up the parasite and ultimately in some way tossed it into a close-by tree, Luo and colleagues speculate.
Confirming this preservation state of affairs would require “full specimens or host stays,” De Baets says.
