Journal article

Exceptional soft tissues preservation in a mummified frog-eating Eocene salamander

  • Tissier, Jérémy Cenozoic Research Group, JURASSICA Museum, Porrentruy, Switzerland - Department of Geosciences, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Rage, Jean-Claude Centre de Recherches sur la Paléobiodiversité, Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, France
  • Laurin, Michel Centre de Recherches sur la Paléobiodiversité, Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, France
    03.10.2017
Published in:
  • PeerJ. - 2017, vol. 5, p. e3861
English Fossils are almost always represented by hard tissues but we present here the exceptional case of a three-dimensionally preserved specimen that was ‘mummified’ (likely between 40 and 34 million years ago) in a terrestrial karstic environment. This fossil is the incomplete body of a salamander, Phosphotriton sigei, whose skeleton and external morphology are well preserved, as revealed by phase-contrast synchrotron X-ray microtomography. In addition, internal structures composed of soft tissues preserved in three dimensions are now identified: a lung, the spinal cord, a lumbosacral plexus, the digestive tract, muscles and urogenital organs that may be cloacal glands. These are among the oldest known cases of three-dimensional preservation of these organs in vertebrates and shed light on the ecology of this salamander. Indeed, the digestive tract contains remains of a frog, which represents the only known case of an extinct salamander that fed on a frog, an extremely rare type of predation in extant salamanders. These new data improve our scarce knowledge on soft tissue anatomy of early urodeles and should prove useful for future biologists and palaeontologists working on urodele evolutionary biology. We also suggest that the presence of bat guano and carcasses represented a close source of phosphorus, favouring preservation of soft tissues. Bone microanatomy indicates that P. sigei was likely amphibious or terrestrial, and was probably not neotenic.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences et de médecine
Department
Département de Géosciences
Language
  • English
Classification
Palaeontology
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/306081
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