NATURAL HISTORY NIGHT
=0D=0A=A new, extinct suborder of insects closely related to dragonflies and damselflies, and the world they lived in fifty million years ago.
=0D=0A=British Columbia’s diverse fossil insect record continues to surprise. A team including Royal BC Museum (RBCM) research associate Bruce Archibald and RBCM emeritus entomologist Robert Cannings recently described the Cephalozygoptera, a new suborder of Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies). They are like damselflies in many ways, but most importantly their heads differ from the conservative damselfly shape. For over a century and a half, paleontologists have described many fossil species of this group, but always classified them as damselflies, thinking that their odd head shape was only the product of distortion produced by pressures during fossilization. Now, this is understood to be their actual shape in life. We now see the Cephalozygoptera stretching back to the early Cretaceous alongside the dinosaurs and across the Northern Hemisphere, thriving after the dinosaurs were gone until they are last seen about ten million years ago in Spain. Their greatest diversity appears to have been in the ancient temperate uplands of southern BC and northern Washington about 50 million years ago. In this talk, paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald describes these insects, their discovery, and the world that they lived in. The monograph describing the Cephalozygoptera may be downloaded free here: https://www.mapress.com/zt/article/view/zootaxa.4934.1.1
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DTSTART:19691231 DTEND:19700101 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR