Health & Science

Bugs from 50 million B.C.; BPA impairs male fertility; Why some people go Left; Walking off the common cold

Bugs from 50 million B.C.

It’s the Jurassic Park of bugs. In a large deposit of amber recently unearthed in India, scientists discovered a treasure trove of more than 700 kinds of arthropods—including perfectly preserved bees, ants, termites, crustaceans, and spiders—from about 53 million years ago. “It’s like having the complete dinosaur, not just the bones,” team member Jes Rust, an invertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bonn in Germany, tells DiscoverMagazine.com. “You can see all the surface details on their bodies and wings. It’s fantastic.” The bounty, which includes at least 100 previously unknown species of insects, was recovered from an open-pit mining operation, and sheds light on both the geological and biological past. Scientists believe that India broke off from a massive supercontinent called Gondwana about 100 million years ago and drifted alone until colliding with Asia about 50 million years ago; the amber “shows, similar to an old photo, what life looked like in India just before the collision,” Rust says. At the time that the semi-transparent amber was formed, from the resin of trees, this part of India was a tropical rain forest, teeming with life. Some of the specimens show surprising similarity to fossils found as far away as Central America, which suggests that the Indian subcontinent may not have been isolated for as long as previously thought.

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