He went to the supermarket, found an insect and thought of a “lion ant”: it was a gigantic creature from the Jurassic period

Michael Skvarla made a quick stop at a Walmart in Arkansas for milk in 2012, when he saw a huge insect at the door of the building. The size of the insect was nearly two inches wide, according to the man who curiously studies insects. That’s why it got his attention so much, so she took it home, where he forgot about it right away after putting it away in a drawer.

Eight years later, in 2020, Skvarla dusted it off and showed it to her students. At that moment something caught their attention and they began an investigation which ended in a unpublished report which the researcher published this week.

It was a huge Jurassic-era insect called a lacewing that had presumably been missing from eastern North America for at least half a century. Today, the fortuitous discovery of the giant chrysoid -or Polystoechs– surprises the scientific community.

In 2012 Skvarla misidentified him, only discovering his true identity after teaching an online course based on his personal insect collection nearly a decade later. Pure coincidence of fate.

“I remember it vividly, because I was walking to Walmart to buy milk and I saw this huge bug on the side of the building. I thought it was interesting, so I put it in my hand and I did the rest of my shopping by holding it in my fingers. I went home, put it away and forgot about it for a decade,” he told The Guardian.

In the fall of 2020, Skvarla, director of the insect laboratory at Penn State, I was giving a course to students university students, which was entitled “Entomology 432: Biodiversity and evolution ofinsets”.

While his students followed him at a distance with borrowed microscopes, he showed them his collection of insects. And, when he went to demonstrate the characteristics of a specimen that he had labeled as “lion ant”, he noticed that they did not match those of the dragonfly-like predatory insect.

Instead he thought so looked more like a lacewing. A giant lacewing measures nearly two inches—large enough for an insect—a clear indicator that the specimen wasn’t an anthill, as Skvarla had mislabelled it.

“My colleagues and I realized that the insect was not what it appeared to be. It was about one o’clock super rare giant lacewing. I still remember the feeling. It was so gratifying to know that the excitement doesn’t fade, the wonder doesn’t fade,” recalled Codey Mathis, an entomology graduate student at Penn State.

For further confirmation, Skvarla and colleagues performed molecular DNA analysis on the sample. After confirming its identity, the director deposited the insect in the collections of the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State, where scientists and students will be able to access it for future research.

The discovery has fueled speculation that there may be entire populations of lacewings hiding in remote parts of the mountains. Ozarks, Arkansas, where was the Walmart where Skvarla found his copy. For this new lines of investigation will be opened to trace more specimens.

As regards the modalities of disappearance of this type of insect, the broadest hypothesis indicates that it could be due to environmental contamination combined with the introduction of allochthonous predators such as large ground beetles and earthworms, which significantly altered the ecosystem.