Cretophengodes azari, a fossil light-producing beetle from Cretaceous Burmese amber (~100 million years old).
Credit: Chenyang Cai
Yes folks! It's 'non-existent' missing link time, yet again. These come up with such monotonous regularity that I hope I'm not boring you with them!
This time it's the missing link between ancient beetles and the modern bioluminescent species such as fireflies and glow worms. This exceptionally well-preserved, 'non-existent' specimen was found embedded in 100-million-year-old Burmese amber. It was discovered and identified by biologists from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology (NIGP) and Peking University in China, led by Dr. Chenyang Cai, research fellow at the University of Bristol and associate professor at NIGPAS.
Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B recently. Sadly, the publishers want money for permission to post even the abstract online but, according to the press release from Bristol University:
With over 3,500 described species, light-producing beetles are the most diverse bioluminescent terrestrial animals. Fireflies, fire beetles, glow-worm beetles and their kin use light to ward off predators, attract mates, and some females even use it to attract unsuspecting males to eat. Historically, despite their diversity, the evolution of bioluminescence in beetles has been poorly understood.The problem this presents for Creationists is how do they explain this extinct species? Their dogma states that no new species can arise by evolution because that would be the impossible' macro- version of evolution - which is why there are 'no transitional fossils'. Yet this ancient species is clearly not the same species as the 3,500 living species of bioluminescent beetles and it is clearly a stem species coming between the non-bioluminescent beetles and its bioluminescent descendants.
“Most light-producing beetles are soft-bodied and quite small, and so have a scant fossil record. However, this new fossil, found in amber from northern Myanmar, is exceptionally well-preserved, even the light organ on its abdomen is intact,” said Dr. Chenyang Cai, research fellow at the University of Bristol and associate professor at NIGPAS.Artistic reconstruction of Cretophengodes azari male and female in the undergrowth of a Cretaceous rainforest
Dinghua Yang
The presence of a light organ on the abdomen of the male provides direct evidence that that adults of Cretophengodes were capable of producing light, some 100 million years ago.
The newly discovered fossil, preserved with life-like fidelity in amber, represents an extinct relative of the fireflies and the living families Rhagophthalmidae and Phengodidae,” says Yan-Da Li from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology (NIGP) and Peking University in China.
The majority of light-producing beetles fall into the giant superfamily Elateroidea with some 24 thousand known species and thousands more awaiting to be described. The discovery of this beetle, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides the missing fossil link between living families and in doing so helps scientists understand how these beetles evolved and how they should be classified.
“Elateroidea is one of the most heterogeneous groups of beetles and that has always been very difficult for entomologists to deal with, particularly because important anatomical innovations evolved many times independently in unrelated groups. The discovery of a new extinct elateroid beetle family is significant because it helps shed light on the evolution of these fascinating beetles,” says Erik Tihelka from the School of Earth Sciences.
We think that light production initially evolved in the beetle’s soft and vulnerable larvae as a defensive mechanism to ward off predators. The fossil shows that by the Cretaceous, light production was taken up by the adults as well. It could have then been co-opted to serve other functions such as locating mates,” says Robin Kundrata, an expert on elateroid beetles from Palacký University in the Czech Republic.
Light producing beetles often have unusual adaptations. One of the most striking ones is that the females often don’t look anything like their male counterparts and instead retain many larval features into adulthood.
What Creationists normally do in this situation is to swiftly move the goalposts by redefine 'macro-evolution' to mean the 'impossible' evolution of a new taxons, yet this specimen is ancestral to two different families within the coleoptera (beetle) class of the insecta phylum, which are themselves part of the diverse Elateroidea super-family, and we aren't even at the genus level of taxonomy yet.
It seems Creationism's putative designer, with its notorious obsession with designing innumerable variations on the basic beetle theme, has designed yet another headache for Creationists. In fact, this is not a new headache for them, it's the old familiar one of how to make their faith-based dogma fit reality, as science keeps discovering it.
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