A newly identified tiny crab specimen trapped in amber not only represents a new species, but it's also the oldest crab to be found preserved in amber.
Nearly 100 million years ago in present-day Myanmar, a tiny crab got lodged in tree resin and was likely entombed while still alive. While unfortunate for the crab, this situation has given scientists a rare glimpse of a time when the ancestors of today’s crustaceans were first leaving the ocean.
“This is the first crab of the dinosaur era trapped in amber,” says Javier Luque, a paleobiologist at Harvard University and coauthor of the findings. “And because it’s trapped in such an exquisite way, it is the most complete crab ever discovered, to the level of not missing a single hair.” Today’s crabs are a diverse bunch, ranging in size from less than an inch to 12 feet across. Some dwell in the ocean, while others live in brackish or freshwater and even on land.
The unlucky crab that Luque and his team describe in the new paper was among a batch of amber pieces initially collected by miners and later acquired from a mineral store in China by the Longyin Amber Museum in Yunnan Province in 2015. The researchers examined the fossil under the microscope and used a technique called micro-CT scanning to create three-dimensional digital reconstructions of the crab’s body.
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