A team of paleontologists has discovered what they believe to be the sperm of the world’s oldest animal, which in Myanmar 100 million years ago contained tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny
The earliest examples of fossilized animal sperm were previously only 17 million years old, according to a team of experts led by Wang Hee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jing.
Researchers said in a paper published Wednesday in the Proceedings Journal of the prestigious Royal Society that the sperm was found inside Ostracode, a type of crustacean that has existed for 500 million years and can be found in many oceans today.
They were found in the body of a female specimen, indicating that she would have been impregnated shortly before being trapped in a tree resin.
To make the discovery more specific, sperm were also described as “giants”, about 6.6 times the size of a man’s body.
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“These 1.70-meters are about 7.30 meters in humans, so it takes a lot of energy to produce them,” Renate Metzke-Karaz of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, co-author of the study, told AFP.
Ostracode was also a new species that scientists have dubbed “Myanmarsyprise hui”.
Quality over quantity
Experts said the fossilized shells of ostracodes are common, but it is rare to get a specimen with “soft parts”.
During the Cretaceous period (approximately 145 to 66 million years ago), the questionable Ostracodes probably lived in the waters off present-day Myanmar, where they were trapped in a spring of tree resin.
Most males in the animal world (including humans) typically produce millions of tiny sperm cells, but for ostracodes, it’s all about quality quantities.
There are many conflicting theories about the evolutionary value of such giant sperm.
“For example, experiments have shown that in one group, competition between men can lead to a longer sperm life, while in another group, even less competition leads to a longer sperm life,” Metzke-Karz said.
“These findings show that” reproduction with large sperm is not an evolutionary extravagance on the verge of extinction, but a serious long-term benefit to the species’ survival, “Metzke-Karaz concluded.
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