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BERLIN (AFP): A team of paleontologists has discovered what they believe to be the world’s oldest animal sperm, frozen inside a tiny crustacean in a tree resin stain in Myanmar 100 million years ago.
The oldest known examples of fossilized animal sperm were previously only 17 million years old, according to the expert team led by Wang He of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing.
The sperm were found inside an ostracod, a species of crustacean that has existed for 500 million years and can be found today in many oceans, they said in an article published Wednesday in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.
They were found in the body of a female specimen, indicating that it must have been fertilized shortly before it was trapped in amber, experts said.
To make the finding even more special, the sperm were also described as “giants”, measuring up to 4.6 times the size of the male’s body.
“This equates to about 7.30 meters in a 1.70 meter human being, so it takes a lot of energy to produce them,” Renate Matzke-Karasz of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, co-author of the study, told AFP .
The ostracod was also a new species that scientists have named “Myanmarcypris hui”.
Fossilized ostracod shells are common, but finding a specimen with “soft parts” is rare, experts said.
During the Cretaceous period (around 145 to 66 million years ago), the ostracods in question probably lived in the coastal waters of present-day Myanmar, where they were trapped in a tree resin stain.
Most males in the animal world (including humans) generally produce tens of millions of tiny sperm, but for ostracods, quality is more important than quantity.
There are several contradictory theories about the evolutionary value of these giant sperm.
“For example, experiments have shown that in one group, a high degree of competition between males can lead to a longer sperm life, while in another group, a low degree of competition also led to a longer sperm life. sperm, “Matzke-Karasz said.
This discovery shows “that reproduction with giant sperm is not an evolutionary extravaganza on the brink of extinction, but a serious long-term advantage to the survival of a species,” Matzke-Karasz concluded.
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