Found among 70,000 droplets of amber from northeastern Italy, the arthropods—invertebrates with exoskeletons and segmented bodies—may look like "alien creatures," in the words of study leader David Grimaldi. But, he added, they're remarkably similar to modern gall mites.
[,,,]
"Despite all that evolutionary change—this is a hundred million years before flowering plants; there was no Atlantic Ocean; dinosaurs hadn't evolved—gall mites don't seem to have changed very much," said Grimaldi, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Triassic Mites Join World's Oldest Amber Animal Finds (Pictures)