ABOVE: An approximately 30-million- to 40-million-year-old fly puparium and a digital section of the same specimen, revealing a parasitic wasp
GEORG OLESCHINSKI (PHOTO) & THOMAS VAN DE KAMP (RENDERING) thomas.vandekamp@kit.edu, g.oleschinski@uni-bonn.de
Researchers have identified four new species of parasitic wasps (Xenomorphia resurrecta, X. handschini, Coptera anka, and Palaeortona quercyensis) dating back 66 million to 23 million years ago in France, according to a study published yesterday (August 28) in Nature Communications. All four species were found within their fossilized hosts—fly pupae.
T. van de Kamp et al., “Parasitoid biology preserved in mineralized fossils,” Nat Commun, doi:10.1038/s41467-018-05654-y, 2018.
