Tardigrade trapped in 16-million-year-old amber a 'once in a generation' find - CNET

Sixteen million years later, that tiny tardigrade fossil was discovered in Dominican amber.

"Of all the currently known and formally named tardigrade amber fossils (three so far, including this Dominican amber fossil), this is the first fossil wherein we were able to visualize its internal structure (i.e. foregut)," Marc Mapalo, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, told me.

"The discovery of a fossil tardigrade is truly a once-in-a-generation event," said co-author Phil Barden in a New Jersey Institute of Technology statement on Tuesday.

"At first I thought it was an artifact in the amber-- a crack or fissure that just happened to look a lot like a tardigrade," Barden said.

The Dominican amber piece with the tardigrade also contained three ants, a beetle and a flower.

While more tardigrade fossils may yet be found in other amber samples, it's a challenging mission."You could spend the rest of your life screening through amber and never find one," Barden said.