Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.

In our posts about the current butterfly exhibition at Montreal's Botanical Garden, neither I nor rysmiel mentioned that Atlas moths have translucent patches in their wings. The effect is subtle: I didn't notice it until I'd seen them against two different-colored surfaces. The first temptation is to conclude that those patches are pale green, or yellow, or brown, depending on what's behind the moth, because multi-colored moths and butterflies are well within the range of expectation.

In brief conversation, none of us came up with a good guess as to what purpose this serves, or how it evolved. The effect resembles that on Australian currency, but I doubt anyone has tried to counterfeit a moth, let alone done so often enough to exert evolutionary pressure.

[rysmiel, livredor, does this seem reasonable and/or startling to you?]

I get the New Scientist rss feed here; this morning, they tossed us another redrawing of the mammalian family tree, which puts horses closest to Carnivora, and close to bats, with cattle closer to whales than horses.
Before cheerfully putting horses closest to carnivora and a distance from cattle, the authors note that

Comprehensive analyses of large collections of DNA sequences mostly reject the conclusions from morphological analyses.

I'm not sure what that does to information derived from fossils.

Reassuringly, marsupials are still an outgroup to the rest of the mammals; the authors seem not to have tested sequences for monotremes, or at least didn't include them on their chart.