The ambers of Chiapas State,
Mexico, were laid down in the Miocene (and possibly Oligocene) in shallow
marine environments. The amber is thought to be derived from resin secreted
from a Leguminous tree of the genus Hymenaea,
which lived in mangrove forests along the Caribbean shoreline. This amber is
almost identical to amber produced in similar mangrove forests during the
Miocene in the Dominican Republic and to a lesser extent other parts of the
Caribbean, and a thriving, and sometimes illegal, trade in these fossils,
combined with poor recording by commercial fossil collectors (particularly
those acting illegally) means that fossils in Caribbean amber derived from
private collections can be hard to connect to their point of origin. To date
two Scorpions have been described from Chiapas Amber, and at least four further
specimens attributed to this source are known in private collections, however
the exact provenance of these fossils is unclear as precise data on the
outcrops which produced them is unavailable.
In a paper published in the
journal PLoS One on 5 August 2015, Francisco Riquelme of the Escuela de Estudios Superiores de Jicarero at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Gabriel Villegas-Guzmán of the Laboratorio de Acarología at the
Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Edmundo
González-Santillán of the Laboratorio de Aracnología at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Víctor Córdova-Tabares, also of the Laboratorio de
Acarología at the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas at the Instituto
Politécnico Nacional, Oscar Francke of the Colección Nacional de Arácnidos at
the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Dulce Piedra-Jiménez, also of the Laboratorio
de Aracnología at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Emilio
Estrada-Ruiz of the Laboratorio de Ecología at the Instituto Politécnico
Nacional and Bibiano Luna-Castro of the Museo del Ámbar de Chiapas, describe
Scorpion preserved in amber from the Early-Middle Miocene Guadalupe Victoria
site near Simojovel in Chiapas, the first known fossil Scorpion that can be
confidently assigned to a specific amber-producing site in Chiapas.
The new Scorpion is placed in the
large (and probably paraphyletic – not containing all the descendants of the
last common ancestor of the group) genus Tityus,
within the Family Buthidae, and given the specific name apozonalli, which means ‘sea-bubble’ or ‘sea-foam’ in the Náhuatl
language, and which was the term used amber by the pre-Columbian Aztecs.
Tityus apozonalli. (A) Amber
piece, arrow indicates the position of fossil inclusion, scale bar 10 mm. (B)
General view of fossil Scorpion, scale bar 5 mm. (C) Close view of the specimen,
scale bar 2 mm. Riquelme et al. (2015).
Tityus apozonalli is thought to be most closely related to the
modern species Tityus clathratus and Tityus columbianus, which are known from
the Caribbean Islands, Central America and northern South America, as well as
showing features in common with members of the genus from Dominican Amber, and
to a lesser extent Tityus knodeli,
which is attributed to Chiapas Amber, though of uncertain origin. A single
specimen assigned to the genus has been described from Baltic Amber from
Europe, Tityus eogenus, however this
was described in 1869 and is now missing, and so is considered somewhat
dubious.
See also…
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