98-Million-Year-Old Mantis Fossil Shows Leaf-Like Abdomen

Scientists have described a 98-million-year-old praying mantis preserved in amber from what is now Myanmar as the earliest clear fossil evidence of mantises mimicking plant leaves.

The Fossil

The insect, named Folimantis hyalinala, lived in a tropical rainforest in the mid-Cretaceous when sticky tree resin entombed it. Researchers named it in a paper published in the journal New Phytologist. The genus name Folimantis translates literally to "leaf mantis", while hyalinala refers to the glass-like transparency of the creature's wings.

Its abdomen bears a resemblance to the extinct plant Selaginella grimaldii, which is also known from amber specimens found in the same region. Paleoentomologist Hongru Yang and colleagues wrote that "the mimicry style of F. hyalinala with Selaginella has never been reported before, and there are no species that mimic Selaginella among modern Mantodea."

Why the Disguise May Have Helped

Flowering plants had not yet taken over when F. hyalinala lived, so its body evolved to resemble leaves instead. Mantises that looked more like their host plant had a better chance of sneaking up on prey and avoiding their own predators. The plants may have benefited too, protected from herbivorous insects by their mantid inhabitants.

The best-known modern example is the orchid mantis, Hymenopus coronatus, a Southeast Asian species that looks like a flower.

What Is Unusual About the Find

Many modern plant-mimicking mantises wear leaf-like features on several parts of the body. F. hyalinala has them on the abdomen only, which could be a hint that plant mimicry began first at the rear, with modifications to other appendages like the wings and thorax emerging later. The leaf-like abdomen extensions are visible through the mantis's transparent wings.

Praying mantises share an ancestor with cockroaches, which lived around 274 million years ago. Recent taxonomic research suggests the first distinct mantises emerged around 185 million years ago, during the Jurassic.

Ethical Concerns

Kachin amber mining and trade is linked to ongoing sociopolitical turmoil in Myanmar. There are concerns that the amber trade is helping to fund what the United Nations condemns as a "genocidal crime against humanity". Myanmar banned the export of fossils in 2015, but specimens embedded within amber have fallen into a legal grey area. In 2021, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology called for a "hard moratorium on the publication of all fossil specimens in amber obtained from sources in Myanmar after January 2021", following a military coup.

The F. hyalinala mantis specimen was acquired in 2015 by a collector, Fangyuan Xia, who later that year donated it to the insect evolution lab at Capital Normal University in Beijing.

Why it matters

The fossil shows that plant mimicry has been part of the mantids' evolutionary toolkit for at least 98 million years. It gives researchers a rare, well-preserved example of how closely the lives of plants and insects were tied as both groups spread across land.

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Sources

• yahoo.com: Scientists Discover a 98-Million-Year-Old Mantis With 'Leaves' on Its Abdomen, Trapped in Amber
• aroundprague.cz: 98-Million-Year-Old Amber Mantis Wore Leaf-Like Disguise on Its Abdomen
• ua.news: 98-million-year-old leaf-mimicking mantis described in Myanmar | UA.NEWS
• journalarta.com: Scientists Discover 98-Million-Year-Old Mantis With Leaf-Like Abdomen — JournalArta Global
• sciencealert.com: Scientists Discover a 98-Million-Year-Old Mantis With 'Leaves' on Its Abdomen, Trapped in Amber : ScienceAlert

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