Modern snakefly pictured above Fifty-two-million-year-old fossil snakefly from Driftwood Canyon in British Columbia. Credit: Fossil image copyright Zootaxa.
Phys.org has an interesting story about some unique insects. Snakeflies are slender, predatory insects that are native to the northern hemisphere and absent from tropical regions. It had been thought the animals needed cold winters to trigger development into adults. However, some new fossil discoveries from British Columbia and Washington state contradict that theory. These four new species, from around 50 million years ago, come from fossil deposits formed in warmer, tropical environments common during that time period. Details were published in a paper in the journal Zootaza.
Fossil discoveries often help answer long-standing questions about how our modern world came to be. However, sometimes they only deepen the mystery—as a recent discovery of four new species of ancient insects in British Columbia and Washington state is proving.
The fossil species, recently discovered by paleontologists Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University and Vladimir Makarkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are from a group of insects known as snakeflies, now shown to have lived in the region some 50 million years ago. The findings, published in Zootaxa, raise more questions about the evolutionary history of the distinctly elongated insects and why they live where they do today.
Snakeflies are slender, predatory insects that are native to the Northern Hemisphere and noticeably absent from tropical regions. Scientists have traditionally believed that they require cold winters to trigger development into adults, restricting them almost exclusively to regions that experience winter frost days or colder. However, the fossil sites where the ancient species were found experienced a climate that doesn't fit with this explanation.
"The average yearly climate was moderate like Vancouver or Seattle today, but importantly, with very mild winters of few or no frost days," says Archibald. "We can see this by the presence of frost intolerant plants like palms living in these forests along with more northerly plants like spruce."
