Chinese scientists have discovered the oldest fossil of burial armor

Nanjing, September 17 (Xinhuanet) -- Huang Diying, a researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his team have found that the date is about 1. 6.5 billion years of fossilized burial nails advance this record1. 300 million years, and decrypted the parental care behavior of mesozoic burial insects. This research result was published online in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences on the 16th.

In recent years, Huang Diying's team has found a large number of Mesozoic burial nail fossils, including 37 from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou biota, 5 from the Early Cretaceous Rehe biota, and 6 individuals from late Cretaceous Burmese amber. Among them, the Hugou biota is about 1. 6.5 billion years old, and the oldest burial nail fossil is from the Late Eocene Florida biota in Colorado, USA, about 35 million years ago, which means that Huang Diying's team advanced the record of burial nail fossils1. 300 million years.

Huang Diying introduced that these ancient burial armor and modern types do not seem to have much difference in form, showing the burial armor 1. Morphological stability over 6.5 billion years. The study found that the ends of the fossil tentacles of these burial beetles are densely packed with some tiny chemoreceptors, and like modern species, there are two types: spherical and cone-shaped. As scavengers, modern burial armor relies on these receptors to explore the stench of carrion. This shows that in the Middle Jurassic, the burial armor has played an important scavenger role in the ecosystem.

The study also found that the Rehe biota bury fossils of beetles earlier than the earliest geological records of other social insects. Huang Diying introduced that through the comparative analysis of a large number of fossils, the study found that the burial armor of the early Cretaceous has been the same as the modern burial carapace, with primary parental care behavior to protect the larvae; while the early late Cretaceous burial armor is jointly cooperated by "husband and wife", burying the carrion as food in the ground, creating holes in the rotten flesh to lay eggs, and raising a nest of larvae in it, which belongs to the typical parental care behavior and constitutes a simple social division of labor.

"The fossils of the burial armor in the Early Cretaceous Rehe biota do not appear to be significantly different from those of the Middle Jurassic, but the 3rd burial armor of the Early Cretaceous can be seen with a sonic file on the ventral dorsal plate." Huang Diying told reporters that the burial armor used the sharp chirping of the sound file to scare off predators, and also communicated with the larvae through this song. Therefore, the sound file is the basis for the social nature of the burial armor.

The family Beetle is a small family of insects, Coleoptera, with fewer than 200 living species. It is reported that the fossils of burial nails are very rare, and the fossils from the Florisent biota in the United States are the only fossils of burial nails that have been buried before.