What is it about?
Fossils preserving evidence of animal behavior have rarely been described. Here, we used the postures of two termites preserved in amber to reconstruct their behavior prior to entrapment. Mating termites form so-called tandems, with one following the other. We investigated how tandem behavior is modified on a sticky surface that simulates tree resin, by comparing the trapped tandems with a Baltic amber inclusion containing a female and male termite in spatial orientation resembling a tandem. Our analysis shows that both living trapped pairs and the fossil pair share a characteristic body alignment, suggesting that the fossil pair was in a tandem. Our approach refines the interpretation of fossilized behavior by accounting for spatial signatures left by trapped organisms.
Featured Image
Photo by Natalia Soto on Unsplash
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Extinct and extant termites reveal the fidelity of behavior fossilization in amber, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2308922121.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
