PSYCHE 
No. 2 
Vol. 71 
June, 1964 
THE FIRST FOSSIL TARDIGRADE : BEORN LEGGI 
COOPER, FROM CRETACEOUS AMBER* 
By Kenneth W. Cooper 
Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, N. H. 
In the summer of 1940, William M. Legg made a small but valu- 
able collection of chemawinite, or Canadian amber, from sparse 
secondary deposits along beaches not far from the entrance of the 
Saskatchewan River into Cedar Lake, southeast of The Pas, Mani- 
toba. His interest in this amber derived from the insects and other 
arthropods it is known to contain, for they are an extraordinary lot 
that very likely represent a Cretaceous fauna of some 60 to 80 million 
years ago (Carpenter et al. 1937; Holland 1951). The collection 
contained well over 200 zoological specimens, and its preliminary 
preparation and study was the subject of William Legg’s unpublished 
undergraduate thesis in the Department of Biology at Princeton 
University (1942). Following his untimely death in 1953, the amber 
and prepared material that could be brought together was placed by 
his family in the collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 
at Harvard University. I had the pleasure of his friendship and of 
fostering his studies at Princeton; this brief study of one of the most 
remarkable of his specimens, and the specific name given to it, are 
dedicated to his memory. 
Among the specimens that Legg classified in his sample are : Crusta- 
cea (copepod ?) 1, Araneida 10, Acarina 27, Thysanoptera 1, Cor- 
rodentia 3, Homoptera 43, Hemiptera 1, Trichoptera 2, Diptera 
Nematocera 59, Diptera Brachycera 5, Coleoptera 3, and Hymenop- 
tera 25. Only one of these was identified by Legg with a form already 
described, and that is a forewing of the hymenopteron Serphites 
paradoxus Brues (in Carpenter et al. 1937). This wing is a remark- 
able specimen because (along with a head capsule, a thorax, several 
legs, and a second wing — all of different insects) it had been 
digested free from the amber by prolonged refluxation in a Soxhlet 
condenser, first with absolute ethanol, then ether, and finally dioxane. 
*Manuscript received by the editor May 25, 1964. 
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