title: Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect.
abstract: Behavior of extinct organisms can be inferred only indirectly, but occasionally rare fossils document particular behaviors directly. Brood care, a remarkable behavior promoting the survival of the next generation, has evolved independently numerous times among animals including insects. However, fossil evidence of such a complex behavior is exceptionally scarce. Here, we report an ensign scale insect (Hemiptera: Ortheziidae), Wathondara kotejai gen. et sp. nov., from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, which preserves eggs within a wax ovisac, and several freshly hatched nymphs. The new fossil is the only Mesozoic record of an adult female scale insect. More importantly, our finding represents the earliest unequivocal direct evidence of brood care in the insect fossil record and demonstrates a remarkably conserved egg-brooding reproductive strategy within scale insects in stasis for nearly 100 million years.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Nanjiao Bieshu 394, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Fangyuan
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.affiliation: Steinmann Institute, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
authors.forename: Torsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wappler
authors.affiliation: Department of Zoology, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland.
authors.forename: Ewa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Simon
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Haichun
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Edmund A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Jarzembowski
authors.affiliation: Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology, University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk, Poland.
authors.forename: Jacek
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2796-9538
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Szwedo
mesh_terms: D018647:Amber; D000818:Animals; D005260:Female; D005580:Fossils; D006430:Hemiptera / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D008425:Maternal Behavior; D009758:Nymph / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D010063:Ovum / Q000166:cytology*; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D018647:Amber
keywords: amber; ecology; evolutionary biology; fossil; genomics; scale insect
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