When the researchers compared their body structure and proportions with living species, they also found indications of regular molting in the fossil larvae from the amber. And such molting is an additional mechanism, allowing even greater enlargement of the trunk. “Overall, there was evidently greater diversity of forms in the larvae of lacewings during the Cretaceous than is the case today,” says Haug. Much of this diversity has since disappeared, and the larvae of most living lacewing species are fast and lean predators. But alongside this mode of being, the strategy of Berothidae has survived: The larvae of this group still develop a considerable corpulence: “This seems to have worked for 100 million years, given that the characteristic of physogastry has survived.”