Crab trapped in a tree; Discovered dinosaur companions

Evidence of organisms that have lived for centuries can be found in fossils. Many fossils buried in soil and snow.

Researchers are interested in fossils trapped in amber. This is because wood chips can preserve for a long time small organisms that are not found in places where normal fossils are found. Spiders, lizards, micro-organisms, insects, birds, and even small dinosaurs have often been found in the woods.

But all such creatures live on land and are often able to climb trees and live in them. But fossils of aquatic creatures such as crabs have now been found in a 100-million-year-old tree. Researchers from China, the United States and Canada are studying the fossil, which was found in northern Myanmar.

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This baby crab is named 'Cretapsara athanata'. The word Cretapsara is derived from the dinosaur age Cretaceous, which is believed to have been inhabited by crabs, and Apsara, the goddess of water and clouds in Asian mythology.

The name Athanata is derived from the Greek word athanatos, meaning immortal. These crabs, which lived for 100 million years, bear a striking resemblance to coastal crabs today. Fossil crabs have tactile horns, cheeks, thin fur, and mouth. It is only five millimeters long. I think it's a baby crab.

Researchers speculate that this is not a crab that lived in the sea or entirely on land. They think they may have lived in freshwater or perhaps salt water in the forest. They also say that they may crawl from one place to another like crabs migrating to the beach to release their young, like the crabs of the Red Christmas Island.

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Fossils of dinosaur-era crabs have already been found, but most of them are incomplete. But Cretaceous provides more information about the history of crabs. This suggests that crabs migrated from seawater to land and freshwater during the dinosaur era, and that the evolution of crabs took place much earlier than previously thought.

Fossil records show that non-crabs formed about 50 million years ago. But the fossils now found are more than twice as old.