They find a Jacobsonian beetle never seen in Africa

An international group of scientists, led by David Peria researcher from the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (IBB), Spain, has found in a nearly 300-year-old Tanzanian fossil preserved in resin a specimen of a family of beetles ever seen In Africa.

The fossil, which has been studied with the most modern techniques 3D reconstructionbelongs to a member of the beetle family ‘Jacobsoniidae’which had never been seen on the African continent, according to the researchers, who published their finding in the journal Scientific reports.

The Jacobsons are a small family of tiny, barely reaching beetles two millimeters in length– which has 24 current species that inhabit tropical and subtropical areas, mainly on islands.

“Their small size makes them particularly difficult to detect, whether they are living specimens or fossils,” says David Peris, who explains that “they usually live in the litter and in rotten wood.”

According to Peris, only four fossil species are known in this family, all described in amber (fossilized resin).

Three of these species have been described in amber since nearly 100 million ago years from France and Myanmar and the fourth is a species described in amber about 40 million years ago from the Baltic.

The specimen described in this work belongs to the species Derolathrus cavernicolus, which until now it had only been seen in Florida, Hawaii, Barbados and Japan.

The unusual thing about this discovery, according to Peris, is that “technically the family does not yet live in Africa, since the specimen analyzed is a fossil that It is preserved in copal from Tanzania, almost 300 years ago”.

The copal is the first step of resin fossilization before becoming amber.

According to Peris, this discovery shows that the family Jacobsoniidae inhabited East Africa about 300 years ago, but not today “because perhaps it is extinct today, as in many other parts of the planet”.

The researchers believe that the vastly different distribution of fossils from this family compared to extant species leads them to think so they were a more widely distributed family in the past and in the present.

The new fossil specimen was studied at the DESY synchrotron in Hamburg (Germany), which allowed the virtual reconstruction of the sample surface preserved in copal.

The research had the collaboration of Mónica M. Solórzano-Kraemer, of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, where the original sample comes from and is deposited.