<p><strong>Two newfound, 230-million-year-old mites (pictured), along with an extinct insect related to gnats and mosquitoes, are the oldest animals yet found in amber—by more than a hundred million years, a new study says. (Related: <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080425-amber-mantis.html">"Ancient Praying Mantis Found in Amber."</a>)</strong></p><p>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 <a href="http://research.amnh.org/iz/staff/dr-david-grimaldi">David Grimaldi</a>. But, he added, they're remarkably similar to modern gall mites.</p><p>One significant difference is that today's gall mites parasitize flowering plants, while the new species lived before flowering plants evolved—hinting at the resilience of the basic mite "design."</p><p>"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.</p><p>As for these specific mites, they were probably the architects of their own demise, he said. The resin that ultimately fossilized into amber could have been secreted by a tree after the mites had begun feeding on it—leading Harvard entomologist Brian Farrell to comment, "Live by the sword, die by the sword."</p><p>(Also see <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070514-poison-frogs.html">"Toxic Frogs Get Their Poison From Mites."</a>)</p><p><em></em></p><p>The amber-bugs study appears this week in the journal <a href="http://www.pnas.org/">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</a>.<em></em></p><p>—Rachel Kaufman</p>