Amber testifies that a pseudo-scorpion "flew" on the wings of a bird 100 million years ago

Chinese and Canadian paleontologists announced in Beijing on the 20th that they found an extremely rare phenomenon of carrying in amber, and a class of arachnids called pseudo-scorpions will "ride" birds. The relevant research results have been published online in the Journal of Geology (English Edition).

Carrying refers to the phenomenon that certain small animals attach to the bodies of larger, large-scale animals, and thus be carried and spread. For example, certain mites or other microfauna can attach entire colonies to the scarab beetle to enable the migration of the entire colony, which acts as a flying vehicle.

Pseudospira are a group of arachnids less than 1 cm long , somewhat resembling scorpions , but without the long tail of scorpions , and are widely distributed in deciduous layers , under bark , under stones , or bryophytes. Some pseudo-scorpions have the habit of carrying, and can attach to insects such as Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, orthoptera and other insects and blind spiders, birds, and mammals, and then migrate elsewhere. Gao Zhizhong, one of the authors of the paper and a doctor of Shanxi Xinzhou Normal University, introduced that the pseudo-scorpion found this time can be morphologically classified into the pseudo-scorpion family, with slender tentacles, nearly triangular dorsal carapace, with a distinct hood structure, a typical oval abdomen and particles throughout the body.

"Pseudo-scorpions are not uncommon in Burmese amber, and entomologists have described the 'hitchhiking' behavior of pseudo-scorpions on flies and scarab beetles." Xing Lida, one of the authors of the paper and an associate professor at China University of Geosciences (Beijing), said that compared with flies or scarab beetles, the huge body of birds can be used by pseudo-scorpions to hide and climb, "generally as long as you clip a feather, you can start happily."

Portability is very rare in the fossil record, and previous reports have been limited to portability in arthropods. "Our new findings in amber provide good evidence of the ancient association between the pseudospitarian family and primitive birds. The feathers in this amber may have been part of the nest, suggesting that as early as the middle Cretaceous period, the pseudo-scorpion used birds to 'hitchhike' and move between nests. Ryan C. McKellar, a professor at the Royal Museum of Saskatchewan in Canada and one of the authors of the paper, believes that the new findings are of great help in understanding the paleontology of such animals.

The newly discovered amber specimen comes from the famous amber-producing region of the Hugang Valley in Kachin State, northern Myanmar. Volcanic ash measurements in the mine show that amber dates back about 100 million years, the earliest of the Late Cretaceous period. The flora and fauna that lived in the humid tropical environment of northern Myanmar during this period were often wrapped in resins flowing from cypress or araucaria, forming amber over a long geological period and preserving it to this day.