Giant fly found trapped in 34-million-year-old amber • DOL

A team of researchers announces the discovery of a fossil of an already extinct and still unknown species of giant fly, trapped in a piece of Baltic amber. The insect is believed to be between 34 and 48 million years old. It belongs to the group Calyptratae and is christened with the name Christelenka multiplex. The study has been published in the journal Systemic Arthropoda Phylogeny

According to the scientists, identifying the new species was not an easy task. “The amber hides many of the most important features of a still-fossilized specimen inside, and a conventional microscope does not allow us to visualize them in detail,” explained Victor Baranov, co-author of the study and researcher at the Biological Station in Doña, Spain.

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Then the team had to resort to more advanced visualization techniques using computed tomography. In the images, the specimen presented an odd mix of morphological characters that showed no obvious signs of relationship to any of the other families of the Calyptratae group, a sub-division of Diptera insects.

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This is a very numerous and diverse group to which important pollinators who play important roles in ecosystems belong. However, its fossils are extremely rare, so there is a great lack of knowledge about its evolutionary history.

Extinct species of flies and still unknown to science |Photo: Jindřich Roháček et al., via Doñana Biological Station

The investigation of this group of flies also contributes to knowledge of the biodiversity of the entomological fauna, which includes insects and other arthropods, in the so-called Baltic Amber Forest, where the fossil was found. Jindrich Rohácek asserts that “based on the present results, it appears that the diversity of Calyptratae was very high in this ecosystem, perhaps even higher than in all of contemporary Europe”.

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Experts believe that this diversity is related to the rapid development of plants in the early Eocene, during the so-called climate maximum. This period occurred about 49 million years ago, about 20 million years after the catastrophic extinction of animals and plants in the Cretaceous-Tertiary period, known as the KT, which wiped out 75% of the Earth’s species, including the dinosaurs.