Oldest known butterfly relatives found by using human nose hair probe

[DavidBrown]

Some German paleontologists have found 200 million year old butterfly scales, pushing the known fossil record of butterflies back by 70 million years. This finding suggests that the butterfly proboscis evolved differently than thought, which was a co-evolution with flowers. Butterflies appear to predate flowers by many millions of years.


Finding the Oldest Fossils of Butterflies Using a Human Nose Hair

 

[Kakapo]

Wow, 70 million years is a lot of time! It's logic, because moths are very delicate, soft and thin, so rarely preserved as fossils comparing with "harder" insects like beetles, dragonflies or orthopterans. Anyway, there is even still living moths, the most primitive ones, still with functional mandibles (the Micropterix and relatives), that eats grains of pollen. While nearly all the lepidopterans are comprised in the other suborder, the one with mandibles fused in a proboscis.