Thursday 27 September 2012

The Cockroach That Forgot to Evolve for “300 Million” Years



This cockroach is assumed to be “40-50 million years” old. Image courtesy of Anders L. Damgaard, via Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

New living fossils are found almost weekly. The latest addition is the cockroach. Russell Garwood and colleagues report on “300- million-year” old insects in PloS ONE, including a cockroach that according to Nature news “resembles a modern cockroach”.

It is no secret that Darwinian evolution should be about change but it often isn’t.

Source:

Catanzaro, Michele. 2012. Ancient insects pictured in 3D. High-resolution fossil scans give detailed portraits of 305-million-year-old juvenile insects. Nature news (26 September).