Rare fossilized dragonflies were found, and they flitted about the area that is now known as Kamloops, and they have been given scientific names, which is a first for British Columbia.
A paleontologist with Simon Fraser University named Bruce Archibald, together with dragonfly expert Robert Cannings with the Royal B.C. Museum, examined nine different dragonfly fossils from a fossil site located 75 kilometers west of Kamloops.
McAbee fossil site, also known as fossil beds, reveals the record from an era between 49 and 53 million years ago. Archibald said that this time was not that many millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
According to Archibald, dragonfly fossils are rare. This is due to their broad and large wings. Dragonflies will float on the surface of the water longer than any other insects before they fall through the water column and into the mud that, after a couple of years, will turn into stone and fossilize them.
Archibald said that the longer something floats in the surface, the more chance it has of being eaten or decaying. These dragonflies would have rarely made it into the fossil record.
Dragonfly fossils
The fossils represent eight unknown species. Six of which were given scientific names, as they were well-preserved enough to identify their origins. They are known as:
Antiquiala snyderae
Idemlinea versatilis
Ypshna brownlee
Ypshna latipennata
Eoshna thompsonensis
Auroradraco eos
These findings were published in The Canadian Entomologist, which a scientific journal.
Archibald said that it took them quite a while to figure out who these patterns of veins on the wings are related to. That is sort of the Rosetta Stone that allows them to interpret the relationships.
Among the new species of dragonflies that they identified, some were linked closely to a set of fossils found in Denmark. Archibald said that at that time, where the continents were not as widely separated from each other, people could have walked from Kamloops to Copenhagen through the forest all the way without getting their feet.
What it can teach us about climate change
Putting together the fossil record can show the different ways, and patterns of life spread across the planet and made the planet that we recognize today.
The researchers said that the fossils represented eight unknown species, six of them were well enough preserved to be given scientific names.
The fossils give insight into how life emerged and developed after the dinosaurs, but according to experts, comparisons can be drawn with how life functions today.
Unlike the other fossilized insects, these dragonflies belong to modern families, mostly to a diverse group that is called the darners, and they would not look out of place today, flying beside a modern pond.
Archibald said that these dragonflies help fill in the picture of the emerging modern world that we know today when it was going through a different climatic regime: a temperate upland in a warm world with winters that is mild that it lacks frost days. He added that if we want to know where we are headed in the future on a planet with increasing carbon in the atmosphere and higher global temperatures, it will be good to look to the past.
