In a 99 million year old amber, zoologists discovered a previously unknown chalk -Age land snail. Striking on the copy: the housing is covered with hair. Such a feature is still found on snails today and may have offered the molluscs a selection advantage, as the research group around Jean-Michel Bichain from the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle et d'Enthnography reports in Colmar in the specialist magazine »CRETACOUS Research«.
The amber, in which the snail of the newly determined art archaeocyclotus brevivillosus is located, comes from a mine in the Hukawng valley. The place is located in the Kachin state of Myanmar in Southeast Asia. The experts around Bicain have examined the find in the microscope and with the help of microcomputer tomography. The fossil snail from the Cyclophoridae family, the tower lid snails, is 26.5 millimeters long and 9 millimeters high. On the edge there are fine boroning hair that only measure about 0.2 millimeters in length.
Hairs on the house are found in fossil land and water snails. The researchers now know of six such hairy species from the family of tower-toed snails discovered in amber from Myanmar. The bristles grow from the outermost layer of the snail shell, the periostracum, which consists of proteins. The research group assumes that the hair – then as now – must have offered the snails an evolutionary advantage. They may have helped the molluscs to settle more easily in foliage. It is also conceivable that the hairiness served for thermoregulation: water droplets caught in the hair would then have cooled the housing. As further possibilities, the researchers list that the hairs served as camouflage or as protection from the acidic earth in the tropical forest floor. Otherwise, the acidic environment would have gradually decomposed the lime layers of the casing.
Again and again experts publish fossils from Myanmar in Bernstein. But dismantling and selling the resin pieces are often under questionable conditions. Therefore, the scientists around Bicain emphasize in their study that "the find was legally acquired before June 2017, that is, before the political unrest in November 2017". In recent years, the political situation in Myanmar has deteriorated significantly: since 2016, the state has been violent against the long -suppressed minority of the Rohingya, and the military couped in 2021. As a working group around Emma Dunne from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg recently examined in »Communications Biology«, the restless political situation, the dismantling and sale of amber directly related: Demand has grown strongly since 2010, which is why in Kachin in the north of the country more amber was also won. Due to military conflicts, however, human rights violations occurred in the vicinity of the mines, and the local population was also sold.
