Diverse transitional giant fleas from the Mesozoic era of China
Diverse transitional giant fleas from the Mesozoic era of China
复制标题
中国中生代的多种过渡性巨型跳蚤
DOI：
10.1038/nature10839
复制
发表时间：
2012-03-08
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Nel, Andre
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Huang, Diying;Engel, Michael S.;Nel, Andre
跳蚤是体外寄生昆虫的主要谱系之一，现在高度专门化以鸟类或哺乳动物的血液为食。这使它们在全变态昆虫目中被隔离，尽管它们来自Antliophora（蝎蝇和真蝇）。像大多数外寄生谱系一样，它们的化石记录很少，仅限于新生代的现代家族代表，因此我们缺乏跳蚤在中生代起源的证据。第一个被确认的白垩纪茎群跳蚤Tarwinia的起源仍然存在很大争议。在这里，我们报告了中国中侏罗世和早白垩世时期最古老的确定性跳蚤-巨型形式的化石。它们表现出许多跳蚤的特征，但保留了原始的特征，如不跳跃的后腿。更重要的是，所有的跳蚤都有粗壮而细长的吸管，用于刺穿宿主的皮肤，这意味着这些跳蚤可能植根于中生代授粉的“长管”蝎蛉。它们的特殊形态表明，它们最早的宿主是有毛或有羽毛的“爬行动物”，后来在新生代辐射到哺乳动物和鸟类宿主。
Fleas are one of the major lineages of ectoparasitic insects and are now highly specialized for feeding on the blood of birds or mammals. This has isolated them among holometabolan insect orders, although they derive from the Antliophora (scorpionflies and true flies). Like most ectoparasitic lineages, their fossil record is meagre and confined to Cenozoic-era representatives of modern families, so that we lack evidence of the origins of fleas in the Mesozoic era. The origins of the first recognized Cretaceous stem-group flea,Tarwinia, remains highly controversial. Here we report fossils of the oldest definitive fleas—giant forms from the Middle Jurassic and Early Cretaceous periods of China. They exhibit many defining features of fleas but retain primitive traits such as non-jumping hindlegs. More importantly, all have stout and elongate sucking siphons for piercing the hides of their hosts, implying that these fleas may be rooted among the pollinating ‘long siphonate’ scorpionflies of the Mesozoic. Their special morphology suggests that their earliest hosts were hairy or feathered ‘reptilians’, and that they radiated to mammalian and bird hosts later in the Cenozoic.