July 31, 2014
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
While searching through a massive collection of 20 million-year-old amber originally discovered in the Dominican Republic some five decades ago, researchers from the Illinois Natural History Survey made a surprising discovery: a new species of miniature grasshopper that is no larger than a rose thorn.
According to Rachel Feltman of The Washington Post, the creature was named Electrotettix attenboroughi in honor of famed naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, and it was housed in one small piece of a 160-pound collection of amber that had been sitting, all but forgotten, in a five-gallon drum.
While modern relatives of the creature have no wings, the newly discovered grasshopper (which belongs to the family Tetrigidae and is also known as a pygmy locust) possesses vestigial wings, Sam Heads, a paleontologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, told Feltman. While he said he “wouldn’t exactly call it a missing link,” he noted that the creature is “an interesting intermediate between a fully winged ancestor and a wingless descendent.”
Heads and his colleagues believe that Electrotettix attenboroughi is believed to have lived between 18 and 20 million years ago, and consumed a diet comprised primarily of moss, algae and fungi. It was discovered in an amber fragment that also contained wasps, ants, midges, plant remnants and fungi, which reveals much about both the physiological needs of the creature and habitat in which it lived.
While Feltman said that the pygmy locust is the first published discovery from the Illinois Natural History Survey team, Heads is confident that several more are on the way. Likewise, co-author and laboratory technician Jared Thomas noted the amber will take several years to get through, and that there’s no telling what they might discover.
“Grasshoppers are very rare in amber and this specimen is extraordinarily well-preserved,” Heads said in a statement, explaining that he creature’s name was chosen because Attenborough “has a personal interest in amber” and because he was “one of my childhood heroes and still is one of my heroes and so I decided to name the species in his honor – with his permission of course.”
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