TY - JOUR
T1 - A tardigrade in Dominican amber
AU - Mapalo, Marc A.
AU - Robin, Ninon
AU - Boudinot, Brendon E.
AU - Ortega-Hernández, Javier
AU - Barden, Phillip
N1 - Funding Information:
Published by a grant from the Wetmore Colles Fund. N.R. was funded by the 2018–2019 Fulbright Non-US Visiting Scholar Program of the French-American Fulbright Commission. B.E.B. is funded by an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Research Fellowship. Acknowledgements
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Eutardigrada
KW - Miocene
KW - Paradoryphoribius
KW - invertebrate palaeontology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117847762&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85117847762&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1098/rspb.2021.1760
DO - 10.1098/rspb.2021.1760
M3 - Article
C2 - 34610770
AN - SCOPUS:85117847762
SN - 0962-8452
VL - 288
JO - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
JF - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
IS - 1960
M1 - 20211760
ER -