A milestone in mapping the history of the world’s insects has been achieved, specifically at Princeton, as two new fossils of the dragonfly insect order, which are about 50 million years old, have been discovered.
A milestone in mapping the history of the world’s insects has been achieved, specifically at Princeton, as two new fossils of the dragonfly insect order, which are about 50 million years old, have been discovered.
The descriptions and names of the fossils were recently published in the scientific journal The Canadian Entomologist by paleontologist Bruce Archibald of the University of British Columbia’s Beaty Museum of Biodiversity and Robert Cannings, entomologist emeritus at the Royal British Columbia Museum.
Archibald said there’s a beautiful record of fossil insects in British Columbia from the age he’s looking at, which is about 50-51 million years ago.
“What I’m interested in is not so long after the dinosaurs went extinct. So what is happening is that the world is starting to become modern,” he said.
“It’s not this really weird Mesozoic time of dinosaurs and weird plants and things like that anymore. We are now in an age where we are beginning to see the emergence of the modern world. And insects are really useful for this, I see many modern species.
One of the fossils is a Darner dragonfly, which is very common today, according to Archibald.
“It wouldn’t look at all out of place by a lake or out in the backyard,” he said. “The other is a relative of dragonflies, which are an extinct group that entomologists would say, ‘Well, that’s really weird, that’s different.'”
The main difference between dragonflies and dragonflies of this species is that their heads and eyes would look very different.
Princeton has long been known for the discovery of insect fossils, with collection taking place in the region for nearly 150 years.
George Mercer Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada first reported fossil insects in British Columbia in 1877. He reported finding them near Princeton on the banks of the Similkameen River.
Archibald said that over the next century scientists would come and collect fossils studying the insects, but no one had ever found a dragonfly or a relative of a dragonfly.
That was until Princeton residents Cathy Simpkins, manager of fossil collections at the Princeton Museum, and Beverly Burlingame, an avid collector who regularly brings fossils to the museum, sent Archibald a photo of their discovery.
“I work pretty closely with them, they find fossils and take cell phone pictures and send them right back to me,” he said with a smile. “And I said, ‘Wow, that’s great.’ You guys this is the catch of the month or even the catch of the year because they found these two.
The members of an extinct relative of dragonflies and dragonflies that Archibald and Cannings identified had been named “Cephalozygoptera” earlier that year.
“It’s really nice to fill that gap and start to understand more about this community and understand how the dragonflies and their relatives came about during this time, the changes that we’re going through in British Columbia.”
Determining the age of fossils comes down to understanding what happened during certain periods of time and in that climate.
“The Princeton area was a cool mountain in a very warm world with a high carbon content in the atmosphere,” Archibald said. “Along with that high elevation, there was a lot of volcanism in that uplift, so there are erupting volcanoes both regionally and across southern B.C.”
Scientists can see how much of the ash in the fossil has decayed and reverse engineer it to find out how long ago the ash came out of the ground.
Archibald spent time talking in Princeton, working with the city, the museum and the Upper Similkameen Indian Band on discoveries. He plans to return in the fall for another conversation.
Another series of important fossils has been discovered and will be published in the next few years.
“I see his job as a big ecosystem of people, and the job of that job is to understand how the world became modern.” Then a great disaster, the extinction of the dinosaurs. And so far it’s going really well, we’re just jumping ahead.”
To learn more about Archibald’s research, visit his website here, or to read his article documenting the dragonfly, find it online here.
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