TY - JOUR TI - Preservation of three-dimensional anatomy in phosphatized fossil arthropods enriches evolutionary inference AU - Schwermann, Achim H AU - dos Santos Rolo, Tomy AU - Caterino, Michael S AU - Bechly, Günter AU - Schmied, Heiko AU - Baumbach, Tilo AU - van de Kamp, Thomas A2 - Tautz, Diethard VL - 5 PY - 2016 DA - 2016/02/08 SP - e12129 C1 - eLife 2016;5:e12129 DO - 10.7554/eLife.12129 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12129 AB - External and internal morphological characters of extant and fossil organisms are crucial to establishing their systematic position, ecological role and evolutionary trends. The lack of internal characters and soft-tissue preservation in many arthropod fossils, however, impedes comprehensive phylogenetic analyses and species descriptions according to taxonomic standards for Recent organisms. We found well-preserved three-dimensional anatomy in mineralized arthropods from Paleogene fissure fillings and demonstrate the value of these fossils by utilizing digitally reconstructed anatomical structure of a hister beetle. The new anatomical data facilitate a refinement of the species diagnosis and allowed us to reject a previous hypothesis of close phylogenetic relationship to an extant congeneric species. Our findings suggest that mineralized fossils, even those of macroscopically poor preservation, constitute a rich but yet largely unexploited source of anatomical data for fossil arthropods. KW - fissure fillings KW - Paleogene KW - Histeridae KW - X-ray imaging KW - internal characters JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -