365 million years old and no wrinkles
This was all very interesting although not earth-shattering from a scientific point of view, until a researcher, who specialized in insects, arrived on the site and started to carefully cut into the shale slabs. On one piece of material that was found the team noticed what seemed from a distance to be a tiny stain but which was shown to be a hexapod upon further analysis. It was an insect in other words. This may seem like nothing at first glance but actually represents a major discovery. It is extremely rare to find such a complete fossil of an early insect. For although insects seem to have dominated animal biodiversity during the Carboniferous (geological period stretching roughly across a period of 350 to 300 million years), no complete fossil dating from the Devonian (the geological period before the Carboniferous) had ever been discovered. Not only had this fossil been discovered but it was in very good condition: insects are not usually well preserved due to the fact that they are fragile and lack internal skeletons. A missing part in order to understand the origin of insectsThis discovery was revealed to be so exceptional that it caught the interest of the American journal Nature, which has just published an article devoted to Strudiella(1). Among the signatories, there are three researchers linked to the University of Liege: Julien Denayer, doctoral student and assistant lecturer, Sébastien Olive, doctoral student, both in the Animal and Human paleontology department directed by Professor Edouard Poty, and Cyrille Prestianni, paleobotanist and scientific collaborator at the University of Liege. ![]() |
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© 2007 ULi�ge
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