MOSCOW, March 29. /TASS/. Scientists from Russia and China have discovered a new genus of aderid beetles from the Cretaceous period. The work will help better understand the biodiversity of that era, according to the press service of Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU, Kaliningrad).
Scientists from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), the Institute of Zoology (Guangdong) and the Geoecology and Marine Environmental Management Research Center of IKBFU have studied a well-preserved beetle found in the fossil resin dating back about 99 million years in Kachin State of northern Myanmar. The find belongs to the Middle Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, known to the general public as the time when dinosaurs thrived and flowering plants started to appear.
"This kind of research is a contribution to basic science, which has no direct practical application at the moment, but may be very significant, provided a certain level of complex knowledge. The fossil beetle is a fragment of ancient Mesozoic ecosystems, which were inhabited by many organisms other than dinosaurs. Understanding the functioning and composition of these systems is the key to the past," IKBFU press service noted.
The specimen belongs to a small family of tiny aderid beetles. The fossil beetle was found to be a species and genus unknown to science. This is the first representative of this family from the Mesozoic era described in detail and scientifically named. Optical and confocal laser scanning microscopy were used in the study.
Scientists found that the new genus is characterized by a pronounced suture between the first and second abdominal segments and by sparse and long hairs along the entire length of the inner margin of the hind femurs. It is similar to its modern "relatives" in homogeneous elytral pubescence, head visible from above, pronotum of equal length and width, and similar proportions and shape of antennal segments.