An international scientific team in which the Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC) participates has discovered a species of a completely new insect family, belonging to the Acalyptratae group. The finding has been produced from a fossil preserved in Baltic amber that is between 34 and 48 million years old.
As explained by the EBD-CSIC in a statement, this rare discovery will allow a better understanding of the evolutionary history of this group of insects, which brings together many of the pollinators and scavengers that live in modern ecosystems.
To identify this new species, they first examined it under a microscope and later took macrophotographs to be able to observe the details with more definition: “The amber obscures many of the most important characteristics of the specimen that remains fossilized inside and traditional microscopy does not allow us to visualize them in detail,” explained Viktor Baranov, co-author of the study.
For this reason, the research team had to resort to the most advanced visualization techniques currently available, such as synchrotron radiation-based X-ray microtomography, a technology that uses high-energy X-rays to construct a three dimensional image of the fossil insect.
In the images obtained, the specimen presented a peculiar combination of morphological characters that were not related to any of the other families of the Acalyptratae group: “We were looking at a family that had never been described before, which was a very important discovery and also very rare”, Baranov has pointed out.
The first author of the study, Jindrich Rohácek, has named the new family Christelenkidae, a combination of the names Christel and Lenka. The first name is a tribute to the German Christel Hoffeins, a scientist who has made enormous contributions to paleontology since she began collecting amber in the early 1980s. And the second is in recognition of Lenka Rohácekvá, wife of the scientist, for her invaluable support in their research work in the field of dipterology.
Specifically, the new species has been named Christelenka multiplex, due to the variety of different characteristics that makes it unique, although there could be relationships with other families of Opomyzoidea and Ephydroidea that need to be studied in the future.
“Based on current findings, it appears that the diversity of Acalyptratae was very high in this ecosystem, probably higher than in all of contemporary Europe,” Rohácek said.
The precipitous radiation of the so-called upper diptera could have caused this great diversity, which is probably related to the rapid development of vegetation in the early Eocene during the so-called climatic maximum, about 49 million years ago.
