India, Sept. 17 -- An international team of scientists has discovered the world's oldest animal sperm inside a tiny crustacean trapped in amber around 100 million years ago in Myanmar. The team, led by researchers from Chinese Academy of Science, found the sperm in a new species of crustacean they named Myanmarcypris hui.

They predict that the animals copulated just before their entrapment in the piece of amber (tree resin), which formed in the Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago. The researchers noted that fossilised sperm are exceptionally rare with previously oldest known examples being only 17 million years old.

Myanmarcypris hui is an ostracod, a kind of crustacean that has existed for 500 million years and lives in all ...