Female Insect Carrying Egg Sac Trapped in 100 Million Year Old Amber
Posted on March 31, 2015
A newly discovered 100-million-year old amber fossil shows the earliest evidence of brood care in insects. The fossil of the female scale insect carrying her egg sac was discovered by scientists at the University of Bonn, together with colleagues from China, UK and Poland. The insect was trapped while carrying around 60 eggs and her first freshly hatched nymphs. They are encased in a wax-coated egg sac on the insect's abdomen.
The age of the site of the discovery was determined using the radiometric uranium-lead dating method. The insect has been named Wathondara kotejai after the Buddhist earth goddess Wathondara and the Polish entomologist Jan Koteja.
Chinese paleontologist Dr. Bo Wang says in a statement, "Fossils of fragile female scale insects are extremely rare. What is unique here is the age of the discovery: 100-million-year-old evidence of brood care among insects has not been found until now."
The young scale insect will slip out of their protective wax coating and seek a new plant to suck on when it is developed enough. The scientists say that modern scale insects also have wax cocoons. The scale insects have a special wax gland.
The scientists also made a reconstruction of Wathondara kotejai. A research paper on Wathondara kotejai was published here in the journal ELife.