The discovery of a new family of insects will help scientists better understand how animals adapt to climatic changes taking place globally.
Extinction and evolution are two sides of the same coin. While climatic changes have been the reason for extinction of many species, they have also fuelled the evolution of new ones. The latest discovery of a new family of extinct insects by researchers from Simon Fraser University may help scientists better understand how animals adapt and evolve to the climatic changes taking place globally.
The new family of insects has been named Eorpidae, drawing inspiration from the age when these insects lived some 50 million years ago (Eocene Epoch). The fossils were found in British Columbia and Washington State, most prominently in the McAbee Fossil Beds near Cache Creek, B.C.
"The Eorpidae was part of a cluster of six closely related families in the Eocene, but today this group is reduced to two. Why were these different?" said SFU's Bruce Archibald in a press statement. "We believe the answer may lay in a combination of two large-scale challenges that would have hit them hard: the evolutionary diversification of a strong competitive group and global climate change."
Climatic conditions were much warmer 50 million years ago, the reason being high levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Winters were not as severe, even in higher altitudes where these insects lived. With time, as the climate began cooling down, distinctive seasons started developing, giving rise to hot summers and freezing winters. This gave rise to the need for plants and animals to evolve and develop the ability to tolerate the cold winters. Most often they did so by migrating to the hot tropics.
"These scorpionfly families appear to have retained their need to inhabit cooler climates, but to persist there, they would need to evolve toleration for cold winters, a feat that only the two surviving families may have accomplished," Archibald explains. "Understanding the evolutionary history of these insects adds another piece to the puzzle of how animal communities change as climate does-but in this case, when an interval of global warming ends."
The findings of this study were published in the Journal of Paleontology.
