Fifty-million-year-old dragonfly species that once flew in B.C. identified for first time
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2019 23:43:13 +0000
Six dragonfly species that flapped their wings in B.C. about 50 million years ago are the first to receive scientific names.
The species were identified in nine rare dragonfly fossils found at McAbee Fossil Beds near Cache Creek in south central B.C. and at Republic in northern-central Washington.
One of the fossils was found in McAbee by Bruce Archibald, a paleontologist at Simon Fraser University. The other fossils were waiting to be named and were identified in museum collections.
Archibald said the dragonflies date back to a period so long ago that paleontologists call it “deep time.
“Part of my job is to make people see that this is a continuum. That’s our world existing on one long thread. It’s not Mars. It’s not Harry Potter,” he said. “It is shortly after the extinction of dinosaurs — maybe a dozen million years after.”
After the asteroid hit that led to the extinction of dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, it was millions of years before biodiversity was regained and species started bouncing back.
“It’s the beginning of the path to our modern world,” Archibald said. “These dragonflies are part of the story.”
Archibald said the dragonflies identified wouldn’t look out of place flying around today.
“These dragonflies pretty much fit into modern groups of dragonflies,” he said.
“If you looked at them flying around, you’d say, ‘OK, that’s a large modern dragonfly.’”
Six of the fossils had enough identifying features to be given names; two other dragonfly fossils were recognized as different species but there wasn’t enough information to give them names.
Naming something, Archibald said, means you have a certain level of confidence about understanding it.
“It means we understand their identity and we can compare them with modern ones and say this is closely related to one that lives in a certain part of the world and they prefer a certain climate.”
The process of identifying and naming the fossils by Archibald and Rob Canings, a dragonfly expert at the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria, took years. It involved looking at the wings and identifying the veins.
“Once you understand the map of the wing, it is like the Rosetta Stone, you can translate what this thing is by the pattern of venation,” Archibald said.
The map of the wing is then compared to dragonflies today from all around the world because something that lived in B.C. 50 million years ago could be related to another species living today on the other side of the globe.
“You have to understand the world species diversity to understand who it is related to and what it might mean,” he said.
One of the B.C. and Washington fossils is related to a fossil of the same age from Denmark.
“You could have walked from Kamloops to Copenhagen through forest without getting your feet wet at that time because the continents weren’t as widely separated and sea level was lower,” he said.
Two of the species identified were named after the amateur collectors who found them. One is Antiquiala snyderae after Sarah Snyder.
The other is Ypshna brownleei, collected by Don Brownlee. It’s the fossil showing most of the dragonfly’s body with legs, the right forewing and right hind wing, and fragments of the left wings. It’s a male whose forewing of about 50 mm long.
The fossil is in the Stonerose Interpretive Center & Eocine Fossil Site in Republic.
“We were really pleased to name some of these species after the amateur collectors found them and donated them to museums where Rob Canings and I recovered them to do this work,” Archibald said.
The findings were published in October in The Canadian Entomologist.