First-Ever Tapeworm Fossil Found in Kachin Amber in Myanmar [Study]

First-Ever Tapeworm Fossil Found in Kachin Amber in Myanmar [Study]
(Photo : Wikimedia Commons/Mogana Das Murtey and Patchamuthu Ramasamy)

Tapeworms are difficult to preserve, but researchers found the first fossilized tapeworm trapped in an amber. It was preserved in mid-Cretaceous Kachin amber from the Hukawng Valley of northern Myanmar.

First-Ever Tapeworm Fossils Discovered

In a new study, researchers from China discovered fossilized tapeworms, which they believed were formed on a prehistoric coastline. Paleontologist Bo Wang and his colleagues at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted the investigation.

The team has "reported the first body fossil of a tapeworm," Wang continued, despite the fact that tapeworms are notoriously difficult to preserve.

The fossils found look like tentacles, and their characteristics match those of live tapeworms known to infect fish, which are classified as elasmobranchs, such as sharks and rays.

The specimen, according to the researchers, infected an elasmobranch host that was left stranded on a beach by a storm or lowering tide.

The tapeworm's tentacle was yanked free and lodged in resin from a nearby plant when the unlucky creature was bitten by a terrestrial predator or scavenger.

Unlike trace fossils, which document oblique evidence of life, such as footprints, burrows, or excrement, body fossils are those in which a living organism has been preserved.

Up until now, tiny circlets of hooks and sucking disks discovered on Devonian-era fossil fish from Latvia have been the closest paleontologists have come to discovering a real tapeworm fossil.

"The fossil record of tapeworms is extremely sparse due to their soft tissues and endoparasitic habitats, which greatly hampers our understanding of their early evolution," Wang said in a statement.

Additionally, bits of fossilized shark excrement from the Carboniferous (358.9 - 298.9 million years ago) and Permian (298.9 - 251.9 million years ago) have been discovered to contain presumed tapeworm eggs. Although it hasn't been verified, one of these eggs is said to have contained an embryo.

"This makes the current find the most convincing body fossil of a [flatworm] ever found," said paper author and paleontologist Cihang Luo. "The morphology of this fossil tapeworm is close to the extant trypanorhynch tapeworms Dollfusiella and Nybelinia."

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What Is Tapeworm?

Tapeworms are flatworms that consist of a series of repeating portions called proglottids and a scolex, or holdfast organ. Tapeworms are considered endoparasites since they reside inside their hosts.

They don't have a mouth or digestive tract. Instead, they take in nutrients straight from their victims' intestines while adhering to them with a grabbing head that typically has hooks, suckers, or hooked tentacles. Over the course of their lives, each usually infects two or three hosts by the consumption of infected food, soil, or water by their eggs or larvae.

The last, or definitive, hosts' digestive systems are where adult tapeworms are located. Every mature tapeworm is made up of a head called a scolex that connects to the intestinal wall, a neck, and one or more segments that grow out of the neck area. Older segments near the neck are pushed back when new ones emerge.

Since tapeworms are hermaphrodites, once the segment is pushed back from the neck, the two sets of male and female reproductive organs in each segment will fill it with viable eggs. The segment separates from the adult tapeworm and is excreted in the feces after it is full of eggs.