For more than 150 years, scientists have been incorrectly classifying a group of fossil insects as damselflies, the familiar cousins of dragonflies that flit around wetlands eating mosquitoes. While they are strikingly similar, ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Feb 24, 2021
3
5583
A McGill-led research team has identified a new species of praying mantis thanks to imprints of its fossilized wings. It lived in Labrador, in the Canadian Subarctic around 100 million years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs, ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 20, 2021
0
1235
The fossilized insect is tiny and its genital capsule, called a pygophore, is roughly the length of a grain of rice. It is remarkable, scientists say, because the bug's physical characteristics—from the bold banding pattern ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jan 19, 2021
0
271
A long-nosed fly from the Jurassic of Central Asia, reported by Russian paleontologists, provides new evidence that insects started serving as pollinators long before the emergence of flowering plants. Equipped with a proboscis ...
Archaeology
Apr 2, 2019
0
49
The insects known as Hemiptera are not a particularly glamorous bunch. This group includes stink bugs, bed bugs, litter bugs, scale insects and aphids. Their closest relatives are thrips, bark lice and parasitic lice. But ...
Evolution
Nov 26, 2018
0
266
Can researchers determine the color of a 200-million-year-old insect? Scientists from China, Germany and the U.K. have new evidence that reveals the true color of fossil insects. The research was recently published in Science ...
Archaeology
Apr 11, 2018
0
401
The evolution of wings not only allowed ancient insects to become the first creatures on Earth to take to the skies, but also propelled their rise to become one of nature's great success stories, according to a new study.
Archaeology
Jan 23, 2018
0
160
During her study on fossil insects of the order Hymenoptera at China's Capitol Normal University, student Longfeng Li visited the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, carrying two unidentified wasp ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 22, 2017
0
252
Insects are astonishingly diverse, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all named animal species living today, and their diversity is widely thought to have increased steadily over evolutionary time. A new study, however, ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 2, 2016
0
306
Today's rich variety of beetles may be due to an historically low extinction rate rather than a high rate of new species emerging, according to a new study. These findings were revealed by combing through the fossil record.
Evolution
Mar 18, 2015
0
154
