100 million-year-old amber piece with lizard leg and mycomycete (arrow). Credit: Alexander Schmidt, University of Göttingen and Scientific Reports
Phys.org has a story about some very old slime. Many fossils have been found amber, including dinosaur tail feathers a few years ago. This time it's some very old fungi. In this case, a mycomycete and it's next to a piece of lizard leg. This is the oldest slime mold every found... they are extremely rare in the fossil record. All the details can be found in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Most people associate the idea of creatures trapped in amber with insects or spiders, which are preserved lifelike in fossil tree resin. An international research team of palaeontologists and biologists from the Universities of Göttingen and Helsinki, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York has now discovered the oldest slime mould identified to date. The fossil is about 100 million years old and is exquisitely preserved in amber from Myanmar. The results have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Slime moulds, also called myxomycetes, belong to a group known as "Amoebozoa." These are microscopic organisms that live most of the time as single mobile cells hidden in the soil or in rotting wood, where they eat bacteria. However, they can join together to form complex, beautiful and delicate fruiting bodies, which serve to make and spread spores.
Since fossil slime moulds are extremely rare, studying their evolutionary history has been very difficult. So far, there have only been two confirmed reports of fossils of fruiting bodies and these are just 35 to 40 million years old. The discovery of fossil myxomycetes is very unlikely because their fruiting bodies are extremely short-lived. The researchers are therefore astounded by the chain of events that must have led to the preservation of this newly identified fossil.
