Scientists are searching through a massive collection of 20-million-year-old amber¹ found in the Dominican Republic more than 50 years ago, and the effort is yielding fresh insights into ancient tropical insects and the world they inhabited. When the collection is fully² curated, a task that will take many years, it will be the largest unbiased（公正的） Dominican amber collection in the world, the researchers report.

 

Perhaps the most striking discovery thus far is that of a pygmy（矮小的） locust³, a tiny grasshopper⁴ the size of a rose thorn that lived 18- to 20-million years ago and fed on moss⁵, algae⁶ and fungi⁷. The specimen⁸ is remarkable⁹ because it represents an intermediate（中间的） stage of evolution in the life of its subfamily of locusts¹⁰ (known as the Cladonotinae). The most ancient representatives of this group had wings, while modern counterparts do not. The newly discovered locust has what appear to be vestigial（退化的） wings -- remnant structures that had already lost their primary function.

 

The discovery is reported in the journal ZooKeys.

 

"Grasshoppers¹¹ are very rare in amber and this specimen is extraordinarily¹² well-preserved," said Sam Heads, a paleontologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois.

 

Heads, laboratory technician Jared Thomas and study co-author Yinan Wang found the new specimen a few months after the start of their project to screen more than 160 pounds of Dominican amber collected in the late 1950s by former INHS entomologist Milton Sanderson. Sanderson described several specimens¹³ from the collection in a paper in Science in 1960, a report that inspired a generation of scientists to seek out and study Dominican amber, Heads said.

 

The bulk of the Sanderson amber collection remained in storage, however, until Heads uncovered it in 2010.

 

Heads has named the new pygmy locust Electrotettix attenboroughi, the genus name a combination of electrum (Latin from Greek, meaning "amber") and tettix (Greek, meaning "grasshopper"). The species is named for Sir David Attenborough, a British naturalist¹⁴ and filmmaker (not to be confused with Richard Attenborough, David's actor brother who appeared in the movie "Jurassic Park").

 

"Sir David has a personal interest in amber, and also he was one of my childhood heroes and still is one of my heroes and so I decided¹⁵ to name the species in his honor -- with his permission of course," Heads said.

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