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    Home > Biochemistry News > Biotechnology News > Moss fossils of a 100 million-year-old special predator have been found.

    Moss fossils of a 100 million-year-old special predator have been found.

    • Last Update: 2020-09-11
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    Recently, Cai Chenyang, Ph.D., Researcher Huang Diying, and Yin Ziwei, Associate Professor of Shanghai Normal University, discovered a type of moss beetle fossil with extremely specialized and specialized predators in the amber of Burma in the middle Cretaceous period, and revealed the morphological characteristics of early moss beetles and the behavioral adaptation of specialized predators, deepening the understanding of the evolutionary relationship between predators and captured predators in early terrestrial ecosystems.
    study was published march 7 in the British academic journal Scientific Reports.
    the development of insects has morphological characteristics closely related to their behavior, through the interpretation of special morphological characteristics to help reveal some of the behavioral characteristics of insects.
    fossils recently found in Amber, Burma, are classified as Staphylinidae, Scydmaeninae and Mastigini.
    given its extremely special tentacles, mouths and wings, a new genus, cascomastigus monstrabilis Yin and Cai, 2017, was established.
    compared with the current moss armor, which is generally 1-3 mm long, the horror ancient whip moss can be up to 6-7 mm long and can be considered "oversized".
    Its jaws are rod-shaped, the upper jaws are toothy and long enough, and more interestingly, its tentacles are extremely sleety, the base sections are significantly longer, and its abdomen has two rows of regularly arranged hair.
    can bend freely between the first and second sections of the tentacles, and when the second section of the tentacle bends downwards, a "tentacle hair trap" consisting of many large stiff hairs is formed.
    this feature is very similar to Loricerinae, an extremely specialized walking insect that is now born, and is fast-walking and specializes in preying on the small creatures that are extremely common on land, the jumpworms.
    analysis of the detailed features of the fossil moss tentacles and a comparison with the habits of the living hairy horned armor, it is assumed that such Cretaceous moss is likely to have predatory behavior similar to that of the woolly-horned armor.
    study showed that the jumper originated early and was one of the first heteets to appear on land.
    the oldest known jumping worm fossils were found in the early Lenny zircon about 400 million years ago, while a variety of jumping fossils have been found in various amber biomes in the middle and new generations.
    Although the present moss has lost its ability to prey on jumping insects for some reason, based on special morphological characteristics, the researchers speculate that the huge biomass source of jumping insects in the middle cretaceous period was used by moss, and that this particular habit of preying on jumping insects continued at least until the middle of the 1980s.
    the geographical distribution of the present-day whip moss is interesting, with breaks between Europe and southern Africa.
    And the fossils of the whipping moss family are more widely distributed, having previously been reported to have been found in the Baltic sea amber of the Pale, and recently found in cretaceous Burmese amber, greatly expanding the distribution of the genus, revealing that it may have experienced a serious extinction event, and that the current distribution pattern is likely to be a relic distribution.
    currently known to be specialized jumper predators include several groups, including the fins and membrane fins.
    of these, Stenus spp., also has a special behavior of preying on jumping insects using the retractable lower lip, but this particular feature is found only in the Baltic amber of the 19th world.
    refore, the discovery of Cretaceous-specific moss represents the earliest fossil record of specialized predators, which is important to further understand the evolutionary relationship between predators and captured predators in early ecosystems.
    the study was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' strategic pilot Category B project, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation.
    paper information: Zi-Wei Yin, Chen-Yang Cai, Di-Ying Huang and Li-Zhen Li, 2017.Specialed appets for Springtail Predation in Mesozoic Beetles. Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-00187-8 ('image author')
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