This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Preserved in amber for about 53 million years, a beetle has been described as a new species by researchers in Spain and France. Named Cnopus twentyonepilotorum, it is the first puppet beetle (family Aderidae) to be formally described from the Oise amber of northern France.
The findings are published in the journal ZooKeys. The study was led by Jules Ferreira, a Ph.D. candidate at the Institut Botànic de Barcelona (CSIC-CMCNB) and the Facultat de Ciències de la Terra of the Universitat de Barcelona, with Erich L. Spiessberger and David Peris.
They worked with André Nel of the Institut de Systématique, Évolution, Biodiversité (ISYEB) at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, a joint unit of the CNRS, Sorbonne Université, EPHE and Université des Antilles, and with Alessandra Patera of the ALBA Synchrotron. Puppet beetles, also known as antlike leaf beetles, are small insects with about 1,000 living species found on every continent except Antarctica. Despite this reach, their biology is poorly known and their fossil record is sparse.
The Oise amber, from Le Quesnoy near Creil, is one of the oldest Cenozoic ambers in Europe and preserves the fauna of a warm, humid forest from the early Eocene. "Aderidae had already been reported from this amber, but none had ever been formally described," said Ferreira. "Our specimen offered the opportunity to fill this gap and to better understand the evolutionary history of the family." To study the fossil without damaging the amber, the team used synchrotron X-ray microtomography at the ALBA Synchrotron, which allowed them to reconstruct a detailed 3D model of the fossil beetle and compare it with living species.
The beetle belongs to Cnopus, a genus that still exists today. Until now, the oldest fossils of this genus came from the Baltic and Bitterfeld ambers, around 38 million to 34 million years old. This discovery shows that this beetle lineage was already established in Western European forests in the early Eocene, roughly 15 million years earlier than previously documented.
Some internal structures normally used to distinguish living species were not preserved, so the fossil cannot be fully compared with all its modern relatives. Its age, however, makes it very unlikely to belong to a species still alive today. "What surprised us most was how little the external morphology of this lineage has changed over time," said Ferreira.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
