Researchers Discover First Dinosaur Era Crab Fully Preserved in 100-Million-Year-Old Amber


Oct 21, 2021

Discovery provides new insights into the evolution of crabs and when they spread around the world

Looking at the ancient piece of amber, Javier Luque’s first thought wasn’t whether the crustacean trapped inside could help fill a crucial gap in crab evolution. He just, more or less, wondered what the heck is a crab doing stuck in fossilized tree resin?

“In a way, it’s like finding a shrimp in amber,” said Luque, a post-doctoral researcher in the Harvard Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. “Talk about wrong place, wrong time.”

Luque spent three years trying to unravel the puzzle and, along with a team of international scientists, reported the findings on today (October 20, 2021) in Science Advances.

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers...ear-old-amber/