On a humid forest floor in what is now northern Myanmar, resin dripped from trees and, sometimes, trapped tiny insects. These trapped tiny insects could be preserved in the solidified amber for hundreds of millions of years. Now, 100 million years later, scientists have found an incredible, shiny, beautiful insect trapped in amber.
You all know this story from Jurassic Park. That was a mosquito with dinosaur blood still in its belly. This is a newly described flat bug named Shaykayatcoris michalskii. And it retains visible pollen grains on its legs. This suggests that flower-visiting by insects may have evolved earlier, and in more insect families, than we thought.
This new insect was described in a paper published in Scientific Reports by Péter Kóbor and Márton Szabó.
Shaykayatcoris michalskii gen. nov, sp. nov.: (a) dorsal habitus, (b) ventral view, (c) pollen grains attached to integument (marked with red circle). Image Credit Nature.com
This insect family is not supposed to have pollen on its legs
The fossil was found in 99-million-year-old amber from the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar. This particular insect belongs to the family Aradidae, also called flat bugs.
Today, flatbugs live under tree bark and eat fungi. They are not known to visit flowers. But the discovery of Shaykayatcoris michalskii in amber shows that these flat bugs were already diversifying in the mid-Cretaceous. They may also have been living in habitats where flowers were becoming increasingly common.
The pollen found in the amber with the insect cannot identify the plant it belonged to. However, the fossil’s mouthparts provide a hint as to its diet. They are slender and elongated, adapted for piercing or probing, quite unlike the stout beaks used by modern flat bugs that feed on fungi. This hints that Shaykayatcoris michalskii may have fed on early flowering plants, drinking nectar or other fluids.
Until now, scientists believed that specialized flower-visiting evolved later, mostly in beetles, flies, and eventually bees. This fossil pushes that timeline back and shows that even (relatively) obscure bug lineages might have been experimenting with flowers nearly 100 million years ago. In other words, the rise of flowering plants (angiosperms) and the spread of insects that visited them may have been more complex and diverse than we previously thought.
An incredible find, and beautiful too
Under powerful microscopes, researchers noticed that the fossil’s exoskeleton still displayed iridescence, the kind of shimmering colour we see in beetles or peacock feathers. This effect is a structural colour (and not pigment), produced by microscopic layers in the cuticle that bend and reflect light.
Iridescence often plays a role in signaling, camouflage, or attracting mates and pollinators. Its presence suggests that insects in the Cretaceous may have used shiny colors to interact visually with other organisms.
“This insect presents the first known incidence of iridescent colouration in flat bugs with a tentative role of camouflage”, the researchers wrote. “The iridescent colouration of the insect suggests an exposed lifestyle, which is unusual among the representatives of Aradidae, a family that has completely adapted to living under tree bark.”
A Crowded Cretaceous World
We know the Cretaceous mainly for giving us the T-Rex and Spinosaurus. But beyond dinosaurs, the Cretaceous was a period of dramatic ecological change. Flowering plants were spreading across land, which until then had dominated by conifers, cycads, and ferns. Insects were adapting in real time, forming the kinds of plant–pollinator relationships that underpin modern ecosystems.
The discovery of Shaykayatcoris suggests that this transition wasn’t just about bees, beetles, and flies. Entirely different groups, like flat bugs, may also have played a role in probing flowers, drinking nectar. They may have carried pollen from flower to flower, as well.
The researchers noted, “the iridescence and the high amount of pollen suggest that the insect was likely to be anthophilous [flower-visitor]. The suspected presence of anthophily in such a specialised insect group like Aradidae suggests that anthophily was more widespread among the Mesozoic true bugs than it can be observed in the case of extant taxa.”