Giant flying bug found at Arkansas Walmart turns out to be an ‘extremely rare’ bug from the Jurassic period

It turns out that a 2012 trip to a Fayetteville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart to pick up some milk was one for the history books. Turns out a giant bug that stopped a scientist in his tracks while he was walking to the store and he ended up taking it home was a rare flying bug from the Jurassic period.

Michael Skvarla, director of the Insect Identification Laboratory at Penn State University, found the mysterious bug — an experience he says he remembers “vividly.”

V said press release From Pennsylvania. “I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, installed it, and promptly forgot about it for nearly a decade.”

Skvarla originally thought the bug he picked up outside Wal-Mart was ants. These insects, according to Missouri Department of ConservationThey appear as fragile, dull flies, with an elongated body, four intricately veined wings mottled brown and black, and scalloped or curved antennae along both head and thorax.

But in the fall of 2020 when he was teaching an online course on insect biodiversity and evolution, Skvarla was showing it to the wrong students and suddenly realized it wasn’t what he originally thought. Then he and his students discovered what it could be like – live on a Zoom call.

“We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope as he talked about features and then kind of stopped,” said one of his students, Cody Mathis. “We all realized together that the bug was not what it had been called, and was in fact an extremely rare giant lacewing.”

A clear indicator of this identification was the insect’s wings. It was about 50 millimeters long — nearly two inches — an extension the team said indicated the insect was not a thoraphyte.

“I still remember that feeling,” Mattis said. “It was gratifying to know that the excitement had not abated, and the wonder had not been lost. Here we are making a real discovery in the middle of an online lab course.”

Skvarla then worked with a team to perform molecular analyzes on the insect. In November, his research on the sample was published in Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.

Giant wings are found throughout the entire continent, but by the 1950s the insect was decimated in the eastern part of North America. Their disappearance is largely shrouded in mystery, with some believing that they may have disappeared due to increased light pollution, new predators, and perhaps even the appearance of new earthworms in the environment that changed the composition of the soil.

The discovery of the Arkansas specimen “marks a new state record and the first specimen recorded in eastern North America in more than 50 years,” Skvarla said in his paper.

“This discovery suggests that there may be imagined populations of this large, attractive insect yet to be discovered,” he wrote, adding that the site where it was found may be “the perfect play for a large, showy insect to hide undetected.”

“It would have been 100 years since it was even in this area — and it’s been years since it’s been spotted anywhere near it. The closest it was found was 1,200 miles away, so it’s unlikely that that traveled that far.” “. “…But a discovery like this really highlights that even in a normal run, there is still a huge number of discoveries to be made about insects.”