The tardigrade's invincibility is the stuff of legend, so it isn't all that surprising to hear it may have endured an encounter with the quantum world.

Ergo, "Tardigrades are an important porthole into soft-bodied, microscale locomotion," she said, with the potential to offer insight into how to build more efficient soft microscale robots.

Tardigrades are micro-animals that can survive in the harshest conditions: extreme pressure, extreme temperature, radiation, dehydration, starvation—even exposure to the vacuum of outer space.

Tardigrades — the microscopic, oddly cute toughest animals on Earth — explained. Six facts about the toughest animal on Earth. by Brian Resnick. Feb 8, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC.

While more tardigrade fossils may yet be found in other amber samples, it's a challenging mission."You could spend the rest of your life screening through amber and never find one," Barden said.

“Tardigrades are truly fascinating creatures,” Molly Jane Kirk, a molecular biologist at UC Santa Barbara who studies how tardigrades have adapted to extreme environments, wrote in an email.

Scientists discovered an incredibly rare fossil suspended in 16 million-year-old amber: a never-before-seen species of tardigrade, a pudgy, aquatic critter that rarely crops up in the fossil record.

For the experiment, Eswarappa exposed this tardigrade along with another type of tardigrade, Hypsibius exemplaris, to UV light. All of the Paramacrobiotus tardigrades survived for 30 days after 15 ...

The tardigrades (sometimes called “water bears”) and the moss they were found in were wrapped in paper, placed in plastic baggies, and locked away in a -4 degrees Fahrenheit freezer.

Some 5,000 tardigrades, also known as water bears, and 128 baby glow-in-the-dark bobtail squid will be among the precious cargo heading to the station. Both will be involved in experiments there.