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Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
Behavior of extinct organisms can be inferred only indirectly, but occasionally rare fossils document particular behaviors directly. Brood care, a remarkable behavior promoting the survival of the next generation, has evolved independently numerous times among animals including insects. However, fos...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378507/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25824055 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447 |
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author | Wang, Bo Xia, Fangyuan Wappler, Torsten Simon, Ewa Zhang, Haichun Jarzembowski, Edmund A Szwedo, Jacek |
author_facet | Wang, Bo Xia, Fangyuan Wappler, Torsten Simon, Ewa Zhang, Haichun Jarzembowski, Edmund A Szwedo, Jacek |
author_sort | Wang, Bo |
collection | PubMed |
description | Behavior of extinct organisms can be inferred only indirectly, but occasionally rare fossils document particular behaviors directly. Brood care, a remarkable behavior promoting the survival of the next generation, has evolved independently numerous times among animals including insects. However, fossil evidence of such a complex behavior is exceptionally scarce. Here, we report an ensign scale insect (Hemiptera: Ortheziidae), Wathondara kotejai gen. et sp. nov., from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, which preserves eggs within a wax ovisac, and several freshly hatched nymphs. The new fossil is the only Mesozoic record of an adult female scale insect. More importantly, our finding represents the earliest unequivocal direct evidence of brood care in the insect fossil record and demonstrates a remarkably conserved egg-brooding reproductive strategy within scale insects in stasis for nearly 100 million years. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447.001 |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4378507 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-43785072015-04-01 Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect Wang, Bo Xia, Fangyuan Wappler, Torsten Simon, Ewa Zhang, Haichun Jarzembowski, Edmund A Szwedo, Jacek eLife Ecology Behavior of extinct organisms can be inferred only indirectly, but occasionally rare fossils document particular behaviors directly. Brood care, a remarkable behavior promoting the survival of the next generation, has evolved independently numerous times among animals including insects. However, fossil evidence of such a complex behavior is exceptionally scarce. Here, we report an ensign scale insect (Hemiptera: Ortheziidae), Wathondara kotejai gen. et sp. nov., from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, which preserves eggs within a wax ovisac, and several freshly hatched nymphs. The new fossil is the only Mesozoic record of an adult female scale insect. More importantly, our finding represents the earliest unequivocal direct evidence of brood care in the insect fossil record and demonstrates a remarkably conserved egg-brooding reproductive strategy within scale insects in stasis for nearly 100 million years. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447.001 eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2015-03-31 /pmc/articles/PMC4378507/ /pubmed/25824055 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447 Text en © 2015, Wang et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Ecology Wang, Bo Xia, Fangyuan Wappler, Torsten Simon, Ewa Zhang, Haichun Jarzembowski, Edmund A Szwedo, Jacek Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect |
title | Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect |
title_full | Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect |
title_fullStr | Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect |
title_full_unstemmed | Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect |
title_short | Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect |
title_sort | brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect |
topic | Ecology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378507/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25824055 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447 |
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