Nature & Environment

Huge bug found outside Walmart turns out to be rare Jurassic-era insect

By T.K. Randall
March 6, 2023 ·  4 comments

The specimen measured around 2 inches in length. Image Credit: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Michael Skvarla / Penn State. It's not every day that you come face-to-face with an insect from the Jurassic era, but that's exactly what happened when Skvarla - director of Penn State University's Insect Identification Lab - visited a branch of Walmart 10 years ago.

"I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building," he said.

"I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade."While teaching an online biodiversity course in 2020, however, Skvarla and his students realized that the insect he had found was actually a rare Jurassic-era species known as a giant lacewing.

These huge insects were once common in North America, but by the 1950s they had almost completely disappeared and are now spotted only very rarely.

"This discovery suggests there may be relictual populations of this large, charismatic insect yet to be discovered," Skvarla wrote.

"It could have been 100 years since it was even in this area - and it's been years since it's been spotted anywhere near it. The next closest place that they've been found was 1,200 miles away, so very unlikely it would have traveled that far."

Source: CBS News | Comments (4)

Tags: Insect