An international team of researchers from the universities of Bonn (Germany), Linyu (China), the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology (China), the University of Kansas (USA) and the Natural History Museum in London (UK), has discovered the fossil remains of a spectacular and unusual parasite that lived in the freshwater lakes of present-day Inner Mongolia (China) about 165 million years ago .
The parasite, a fly larva with a thorax formed entirely like a suction plate, could attach itself to salamanders and suck their blood with its mouth ; a technique that until now had not been seen in any type of insect.
According to the researchers, this elongated-bodied fly larva that would barely measure about 2 centimeters and which has been baptized as “Jurassica Qiyia” (Jurassica for the period to which the fossils belong and Qiyia, which means strange in Chinese), underwent a spectacular evolution where its thorax became a gigantic suction plate with caterpillar-like legs.
“ There are currently no insects with a similar body shape . That the strange larva from the Jurassic has remained so well preserved to this day is partly due to the fine-grained stone the animals were on, ”says study co-author Wang Bo.
The finding has been published in the eLife magazine.
