This 50-million-year-old mite fossil, preserved in amber on the back of a spider, is the smallest ever scanned to date, according to the Royal Society Biology Letters magazine in its latest issue.
David Penney and his colleagues at the University of Manchester scanned the image of the tiny Eocene fossil using X-ray computed tomography , and then reconstructed it using three-dimensional techniques. Measuring just 170 millionths of a meter , the mite on the spider captured in amber from the Baltic Sea is proof of the direct link between the two species. Unable to move easily on their own, these tiny insects used suction mechanisms to attach to other animals .
"A fossil like the one we described in our study appears once every 100,000 specimens, " says Penney, who applied contrast techniques to reconstruct the image. Previous attempts to analyze fossils in amber with CT scans had not yielded the desired results.
