Let’s hear it for paleontology!

I’ve always been fascinated by biodiversity and the evolution of species, including those who shared their existence with dinosaurs. Discovering a fossilized insect specimen helps elucidate the evolution of its group. It’s always a thrill to be able to determine how, when and where a characteristic came into being. Since my beginnings in entomology, I’ve never stopped dreaming of describing a species frozen in time in amber.

An unknown species preserved in amber

In our article published in ZooKeys,we describe a new insect from the Aradidae family, which we named Sauronaradus meganae. The specimen was found in Burmese amber that dates from the Cretaceous period. Let’s demystify the discovery...

When dinosaurs ruled the Earth

The insect in question lived during the Cretaceous period, roughly 66 to 145 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs dominated the Earth. That era was also marked by a great diversification of flowering plants and insects. The Cretaceous period ended with the disappearance of non-avian dinosaurs (all of them except birds).

Invaluable amber

Amber is the resin of coniferous trees that took over millions of years to fossilize. Just as they do today, those trees secreted resin as a means of protection when they were injured or infected. But the process involving the formation of amber is extremely long. The resin hardens slowly, buried under layers of sediment and fossilizing over a period of millions of years under the effect of pressure and heat. And that’s how resin is transformed into amber. With a little luck, an insect may find itself trapped in the resin, becoming a fossil inclusion.

There are different types of amber, depending on the part of the world and the time when the amber was formed. In general, they have slightly different shades of color. The best known are Baltic amber, found in the Baltic Sea region and formed about 40 million years ago, Dominican amber, rich in fossil insect inclusions and dating from roughly 20 million years ago, and Burmese amber, which comes from a region in Burma and was formed about 100 million years ago.

What is this new insect?

The specimen we described is a hemipteran in the Aradidae family. Aradidae exist to this day. They’re flat bugs, often hiding in the bark of trees, and less than a centimeter long. They feed primarily on fungi. The discovered specimen’s morphological features and principal characteristics are very similar to those of modern species. It can therefore be assumed that they also behaved in similar ways. If our species had a close association with trees, it comes as no surprise that a specimen was accidentally trapped in resin.

The impact of movies on paleontology

Remember John Hammond’s cane in the first Jurassic Park film? The knob is crowned with a big piece of amber containing an insect. Although the inclusion is a dipteran (fly) rather than a hemipteran (true bug), it’s in studying that type of piece of amber that something new can potentially be found. But is it possible to extract DNA from this specimen or from fungi it had eaten and to produce clones of it? Unfortunately not.

Why did we name our specimen Sauron?

When you picture the specimen with its upward-pointing antennas and its spines close to the head, it looks like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. But there’s nothing evil about our insect! We chose the name because the species physically resembles the representation of Sauron in the movie series. The spines, so threatening on Sauron, probably served as protection against predation for the insect.