Jurassic butterflies

2018-01-11T12:54:40Z

sovay pointed to an article saying that butterfly fossils prove that the proboscis evolved a full geologic period before flowering plants did, and asked "So what were they eating with them?" One possibility is carrion. I got curious and googled: The full paper is online. No, they haven't found a fossilized butterfly or moth proboscis: what they have are microfossils of different kinds of scales, pushing the earliest date for Glossata, the moths and butterflies which have those mouth-parts, to the end of the Triassic, way before the evolution of flowering plants.

The authors of the paper think those proboscises evolved originally to drink water, and some butterflies and moths then started using them partly to get nectar from horsetails. So, maybe those long mouthparts drove the evolution of flowering plants, rather than the other way around. There's also an offhand reference (as to something that people in the field already know) to "increased herbivory" of insects, with specifics about leaf-eating.

Meanwhile, the Scientific American article also quotes people saying "maybe not" about significant ancient diversification of Lepidoptera, and one who calls the authors' interpretation "widely speculative"; everyone seems to agree that this is a good area for approach for research, and more microfossils would be useful.

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Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Jurassic butterflies