During its lifetime nearly 100 million years ago, a newfound parasitic worm likely made its home in the bellies of fish. So how one ended up preserved in amber, fossilized tree resin, has paleontologists scratching their heads.
Unearthed in northern Myanmar, the worm has several features that closely resemble those of modern tapeworms in shark intestines, paleontologist Cihang Luo and colleagues report March 22 in Geology.
Luo’s team had been examining amber collected from traders in Myanmar, finding mostly insects and roundworms trapped inside, when the researchers came across a “strange-looking fossil,” says Luo, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China. This 10-millimeter-long threadlike specimen appeared
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