Researchers have made an exciting discovery: The oldest known mosquito fossils, dating back to the Early Cretaceous period, around 130 million years ago.
The discovery, published in the journal Current Biology, was obtained from Lower Cretaceous amber found in Lebanon and has an intriguing feature. The fossils belong to male mosquitoes and have mouthparts designed to pierce, suggesting that unlike today, they fed on blood.
This is a big deal because in today’s world, only female mosquitoes are known to feed on blood. Male mosquitoes feed on plant nectar for energy, just like honeybees.
Dany Azar from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology and Lebanese University and André Nel from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris were part of the team behind this discovery. They said that Lebanese amber is extremely valuable for scientific research.
It is one of the oldest known ambers containing biological material, dating back to a time when flowering plants began to spread along with their pollinators. Previously, the oldest mosquito fossils dated to the mid-Cretaceous period. This new discovery pushes the emergence of the mosquito family known as Culicidae back about 30 million years to the early Cretaceous.
This discovery is important because it helps fill gaps in the mosquito lineage and provides new insights into the evolution of mosquitoes.
Culicidae is a large family that includes more than 3000 species of mosquitoes. Modern female mosquitoes are famous for their blood-sucking habits, which carry the possibility of many infectious diseases. The discovery of blood-sucking habits in ancient male mosquitoes suggests that this trait has evolved more complexly than previously thought.
Blood-feeding in insects is believed to have evolved from mouthparts originally used to suck plant fluids. For example, fleas, which currently feed on blood, probably evolved from their nectar-feeding ancestors.
The study, led by Azar, Nel, Diying Huang and Michael S. Engel, describes the sharp, triangular jaws of male mosquitoes and their elongated structures with small, tooth-like parts ideal for piercing. This anatomy suggests that ancient male mosquitoes were equipped to feed on blood.
This new finding extends the precise existence of mosquitoes back to the early Cretaceous and raises new questions about the evolution of blood-feeding habits in insects.
The research team is trying to discover why these early Cretaceous male mosquitoes needed to feed on blood and why this trait has been lost in modern male mosquitoes.