On the occurrence of Tuckerella fossilibus (Acariformes: Tuckerellidae) in Bitterfeld amber

ABSTRACT

An inclusion of a peacock mite species Tuckerella fossilibus Khaustov, Sergeyenko & Perkovsky, 2014 of the plant-feeding family Tuckerellidae (Acariformes: Tetranychoidea) was found in a sample of Bitterfeld amber from Germany. The finding is noteworthy because of the rare occurrence of this species in the fossil record (currently restricted to the holotype from Rovno amber in the Ukraine), a stase which is at least a tritonymph, and pine pollen grains entangled with opisthosomal setae from row H. Under these circumstances, the present discovery supplements the original diagnosis of the species and allows discussion of some aspects of its morphology, ecology and biogeography.

KEYWORDS:

• Acari
• fossil mites
• morphology
• palaeontology
• peacock mites

Acknowledgments

I would like to cordially thank Brigit and Günter Klug (Lübeck, Germany) for making the amber sample from their private collection available for research, and their kind collaboration, without which this paper would not have been created. I thank Olga Borisova (Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia) for her help with pollen identification. I thank two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve the original version of the manuscript. The scientific work was financed from the budget for science in the years 2018–2021, as a research project under the “Diamond Grant” program (No. DI2017 002547).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego [DI2017 002547].