Fossil Discovery Deepens Snakefly Mystery
Published:14 Apr.2021 Source:Simon Fraser University
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.