Scientist calls fossilized assassin bug private parts ‘rare treat’

Maybe the phrase should be “snug like an insect in a rock”.

Daniel Swanson, an entomology graduate student at the University of Illinois, was able to see the intimate details of the genitals of a killer insect in a 50 million year old fossil. The genital capsule is as small as a grain of rice, but it has revealed its secrets after all this time.

“Seeing these fine structures in the internal genitalia is a rare treat,” Swanson said Tuesday in a statement from the University of Illinois. “Normally we only get this level of detail in the species that live today.”

Scientists can learn a lot about the private parts of insects, which can help determine if an insect is a previously unknown species. This extinct specimen represents a new species of predatory insect, and the discovery helps extend the history of banded killer bugs to 25 million years ago.

“There are about 7,000 species of killer bugs described, but only about 50 fossils of these insects are known,” Swanson said. “This speaks to the improbability of even having a fossil, let alone a fossil of this age, that offers so much information.

The fossilized insect has made quite a journey. It was found in 2006 in modern Colorado in an area called the Green River Formation. The fossil split neatly in half and was sold by a dealer to two different collectors. The researchers chased the two pieces to conduct the study of the insect.

One of the collectors, Dan Judd, donated his version of the virus to the Illinois Natural History Survey, which worked on the study and received a tribute in return. The research team named the new species “Aphelicophontes danjuddi”.