ON THE WEB

from Exotics Keeper Magazine September 2021

MYTH BUSTED

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AmphibiaWeb connects people around the world by synthesizing and sharing information about amphibians to enable research, education, and conservation www.amphibiaweb.org that, based on its broken ends, suggested it was part of a much larger piece that might be more likely to contain things inside it. Then, they subjected the whole specimen to an intense x-ray beam at a synchrotron. By rotating the coprolite in the beam, they created 3D reconstructions of the coprolite’s contents. What they saw astounded them: incredibly preserved, nearly complete insects just 1.4 millimetres long, as well as fragments like heads, antennae, and legs.

The new species came from dung presumed to have been excreted by Silesaurus opolensis, a beaked dinosaur ancestor about 2.3 meters in length. The beetles were well preserved because coprolites act as microenvironments that can preserve organic material, including soft tissues, without any of the flattening that comes with other fossil types.

This extinct beetle likely belonged to a group known as Myxophaga, small beetles that thrive on algae in wet habitats, says study co-author Martin Fikáček, an entomologist at National Sun Yat-sen University. The team categorized it taxonomically by noting shared characteristics, like the number of abdomen segments or the position of the antennae, to modern Myxophaga, of which four lineages still survive today. The find is remarkable, Qvarnström says. “We have found bits and pieces [of insects in fossilized faeces] before, but not enough to describe a new species, genus, and family,” like this.

As for T. coprolithica, researchers say there is no way of knowing why it went extinct while its cousins survived into the modern era.

(Source; www.sciencemag.org)

Collated and written by Paul Irven.

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