![]() ![]() The ‘Phosphorites du Quercy’, in southwestern France, include numerous karstic fissures in-filled by phosphatic sediments rich in vertebrate remains ( Legendre et al., 1997 Pélissié & Sigé, 2006). sigei was likely amphibious or terrestrial, and was probably not neotenic. We also suggest that the presence of bat guano and carcasses represented a close source of phosphorus, favouring preservation of soft tissues. These new data improve our scarce knowledge on soft tissue anatomy of early urodeles and should prove useful for future biologists and palaeontologists working on urodele evolutionary biology. Indeed, the digestive tract contains remains of a frog, which represents the only known case of an extinct salamander that fed on a frog, an extremely rare type of predation in extant salamanders. These are among the oldest known cases of three-dimensional preservation of these organs in vertebrates and shed light on the ecology of this salamander. ![]() In addition, internal structures composed of soft tissues preserved in three dimensions are now identified: a lung, the spinal cord, a lumbosacral plexus, the digestive tract, muscles and urogenital organs that may be cloacal glands. This fossil is the incomplete body of a salamander, Phosphotriton sigei, whose skeleton and external morphology are well preserved, as revealed by phase-contrast synchrotron X-ray microtomography. PeerJ 5: e3861 įossils are almost always represented by hard tissues but we present here the exceptional case of a three-dimensionally preserved specimen that was ‘mummified’ (likely between 40 and 34 million years ago) in a terrestrial karstic environment. ![]() Exceptional soft tissues preservation in a mummified frog-eating Eocene salamander. Cite this article Tissier J, Rage J, Laurin M. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. Licence This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. 3 Département Histoire de la Terre, UMR 7207, Centre de Recherches sur la Paléobiodiversité et les Paléoenvironnements, CNRS/MNHN/UPMC (Sorbonne Universités), Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, France DOI 10.7717/peerj.3861 Published Accepted Received Academic Editor Virginia Abdala Subject Areas Paleontology, Zoology Keywords Soft tissues, Phosphorites du Quercy, Exceptional preservation, Extinct urodele, Ecology, Synchrotron microtomography, Three-dimensional preservation, Eocene Copyright © 2017 Tissier et al. ![]()
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