This fossil is found in Colorado and is a species now called Aphelicophontes danjuddi. A small beetle also appears with the larger assassin.
Daniel Swanson / Paleontological Society
Maybe the phrase should be ‘cozy like a bug in a rock’.
Daniel Swanson, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, could see the intimate details of the genitals of an assassin in a 50-million-year-old fossil. The sex capsule is as small as a grain of rice, but it kept revealing its secrets.
“Seeing these fine structures in the internal genitals is a rare treatment,” Swanson said Tuesday in a statement from the University of Illinois. “Normally we only get this level of detail in species that live today.”
There is a lot that scientists can learn from private parts of bugs, which can help determine if an insect is an unknown species. This extinct monster represents a new species of predatory insect, and the find helps to extend the history of born assassins by 25 million years.
“About 7,000 species of killers have been described, but only 50 fossils of these bugs are known,” Swanson said. “It just speaks to the improbability that there is even a fossil, let alone one of this century, that offers so much information.”
The petrified bug had quite a journey. It was found in 2006 in present-day Colorado in an area called the Green River Formation. The fossil split half clean and was sold by a trader to two different collectors. The researchers hunted the two pieces to study the insect.
One of the collectors, Dan Judd, donated his side of the bug to the Illinois Natural History Survey, which worked on the study, and received a tribute in return. The research team calls the new species ‘Aphelicophontes danjuddi’.