Image of the Day: Scorpionfly Fossils

Scorpionfly remains trapped in a piece of amber represent the first 3-D specimens of the insects scientists have collected, facilitating study of their elongated mouthparts.

Bo Wang, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

A99-million-year-old piece of amber found near a small village in Burma contains the remains of two species of a newly named genus (Burmopsyche bella and B. xiai) of the Aneuretopsychidae family of long-proboscid scorpionflies, according to a study published on March 4 in Science Advances. The fossils, the first 3-D specimens of their kind found, date back to the Late Cretaceous, upending earlier research on 2-D Aneuretopsychidae samples that concluded the family of insects had gone extinct by the end of the Early Cretaceous, between roughly 100 million and 125 million years ago.

According to a press release, the scorpionflies’ “widely separated claws” may indicate that they “fed on...