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‘A rare treat’: Paleontologists detect 50-million-year-old fossil bug penis - Haaretz

‘A rare treat’: Paleontologists detect 50-million-year-old fossil bug penis - Haaretz

‘A rare treat’: Paleontologists detect 50-million-year-old fossil bug penis - Haaretz
Jan 19, 2021 2 mins, 39 secs

Now a bug that lived 50 million years ago has been found in Colorado, in such an extraordinary state of preservation that we can still see the stripes on his little legs.

“The dark stuff inside [the pygophore – see photograph] is portions of the internal genitalia that have been differentially preserved,” Swanson notes.

Said treat enabled Swanson and Heads to identify the insect as not only an unknown species, but an unknown genus (a genus is a group of species that arose from a common ancestor) in the broader family of assassin bugs, of which about 7,000 exist today.

Asked how sure they can be it’s an assassin bug, let alone an unknown species of assassin bug 50 million years after the event, Swanson replies: “When working with fossils, it’s difficult to be 100 percent certain about anything. But the evidence certainly supports the identification of an assassin bug. In fact, the genitalia that were fantastically preserved in this fossil strongly match in basic structure the genitalia of assassin bugs living today.”.

Heads elaborates that indeed, after tens of millions of years, a species – however similar the fossil may look to extant ones – wouldn’t be the same.

“At higher organization levels (like family and genus), there are examples of animals that are basically unchanged from tens of millions of years ago?

But we wouldn’t expect any species that lived millions of years ago to still be around today. Though a very slow process, evolution is still a dynamic one,” Heads points out.

But in this case each half actually contains half the insect – and yes, each half had half the pygophore.

Heads, a self-described expert on mineralized insect genitalia, explains why the discovery of the insect’s pygophore is such a momentous event and why it matters: the unique form of the genitalia can be key to determining species.

The case of insect genitalia is harder to elucidate because they are smaller, and usually fossils don’t preserve information at such a resolution, let alone soft tissues (no insult intended).

“It’s almost unheard of for internal male genitalia to be preserved in carbonaceous compressions like ours,” Swanson says – though the team notes that fossil arthropod genitals have been found before.

For example, in Scotland, paleontologists found a harvestman (a type of daddy longlegs) aged about 400 million years old whose genitalia were on display too.

The dating of the Colorado assassin bug to 50 million years ago means the group is twice as old as had been thought.

Arthropods go back hundreds of millions of years, possibly originating in the Ediacaran period half a billion years ago.

“The branch of the family tree to which the new fossil is thought to belong is currently estimated around 25 million years old. So it means that one branch of assassin bugs probably diversified earlier (or, is older) than we thought. It’s still an open question if this affects the overall age of assassin bugs as a whole, but probably not much, if any,” he says

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