Unearthed: World’s Oldest Animal Sperm—And It’s Giant

The sperm, belonging to a tiny marine crustacean, dates back nearly 100 million years, making it the most ancient animal sperm found to date.

Written byMax Kozlov

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ABOVE: STUCK IN AMBER: The record-setting sperm was found in a new ostracod species called Myanmarcypris hui.
HE WANG & XIANGDONG ZHAO, NANJING UNIVERSITY

The paper
H. Wang et al., “Exceptional preservation of reproductive organs and giant sperm in Cretaceous ostracods,” Proc R Soc B, 287:20201661, 2020.

Something giant lingers in a tiny piece of amber the size of a postage stamp. It’s the world’s oldest sperm, and it’s relatively big—nearly five times longer than the creature from which it came.

The sperm dates back 100 million years and belongs to an ancient ostracod, a relative of millimeter-long crustaceans still alive today. It’s almost 50 million years older than the previously catalogued oldest sperm, according to Nanjing University paleontologists He Wang and Bo Wang, who studied it.

Timing was key to the perfect preservation of the sperm, which is rarely fossilized. The researchers found a tangled clump of sperm and four tiny ...

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Meet the Author

Max Kozlov
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Max is a science journalist from Boston. Though he studied cognitive neuroscience, he now prefers to write about brains rather than research them. Prior to writing for The Scientist as an editorial intern in late 2020 and early 2021, Max worked at the Museum of Science in Boston, where his favorite part of the job was dressing in a giant bee costume and teaching children about honeybees. He was also a AAAS Mass Media Fellow, where he worked as a science reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Read more of his work at www.maxkozlov.com.
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