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When a team of paleontologists cut into that amber, they found something no living beetle carries. Its antennae branch, and then those branches branch again into two separate kinds.<\/p>\n
Yanda Li, a doctoral student at the\u00a0University of Bristol<\/a>, led the work. <\/p>\n He teamed up with Professor Chenyang Cai of the\u00a0Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences\u00a0(NIGPAS<\/a>).<\/p>\n The team named the beetle Icaroramus perisi, after Icarus, the figure who flew too close to the sun. The species name honors the paleoentomologist Dr. David Peris.<\/p>\n Antennae unlike any beetle<\/p>\n The antennae of Icaroramus perisi have 12 segments. Each of the middle eight segments sprouts two separate pairs of side branches.<\/p>\n One pair rises from the base of a segment, longer and slightly swollen at the tip, coated in coarse hairs. The other pair sits nearer the middle, shorter and thinner, with only fine hairs.<\/p>\n No beetle, living or extinct, has had antennae like these. The team calls the pattern quadriheteroramose, meaning four branches of two different types on a single segment.<\/p>\n The extra branches likely trace back to how an antenna forms, dividing into segments<\/a> in sequence and then stopping. <\/p>\n In Icaroramus, that program seems to have switched back on inside segments already set, budding branches instead of new segments.<\/p>\n Branches built for smelling<\/p>\n An antenna is an insect<\/a>\u2018s nose. Fine hairs along it, called sensilla, hold the nerve cells that catch airborne chemicals.<\/p>\n More branches add surface area. That extra area holds more sensilla, which sharpens the sense of smell.<\/p>\n Males often carry the showiest antennae. They have to track the faint pheromone trails that females leave, and finer antennae widen the search.<\/p>\n Males that hunt by scent<\/p>\n The specimen is a male. In many firefly relatives, females never grow wings.<\/p>\n Those females keep a larval shape into adulthood, while the winged males fly off to find them.<\/p>\n That split pushes males to build better scent detectors, which may explain the beetle\u2019s elaborate antennae. <\/p>\n Yanda Li and his colleagues read the branched antennae as a sign that Icaroramus perisi hunted for mates mostly by smell.<\/p>\n The two branch types may have split the labor, one tuned to one class of chemical and the other to a second. <\/p>\n Moths do the same, with the main antennal shaft and its branches carrying different kinds of sensors.<\/p>\n A light organ for defense<\/p>\n The fossil also preserves a light organ on the underside of its abdomen. In fireflies today, such a glow can warn off predators, attract mates, lure prey, or light a path.<\/p>\n That pairing is what makes Icaroramus odd. Fireflies now rarely carry both branched antennae and a working light, because the two usually go with different mating strategies.<\/p>\n Species that flash for mates tend to have plain antennae and large eyes. Species with elaborate antennae usually court by scent and leave the flashing behind.<\/p>\n The researchers doubt that Icaroramus glowed mainly to court. <\/p>\n They argue that the light most likely worked as a warning to predators \u2013 a defensive role that came before courtship flashing.<\/p>\n Two signals, one body<\/p>\n If the glow was mainly a defense, then the first firefly relatives probably courted by scent. The heavy antennae on Icaroramus point that way.<\/p>\n The oldest glow of all may have been a young beetle\u2019s trait. In many fireflies the larvae glow to warn predators, and only later did adults borrow the light for courtship.<\/p>\n The light organ still leaves room for a halfway stage. The beetle may have begun folding its glow into courtship without dropping pheromones as its main signal<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some living fireflies run both channels together. They flash and release scent during mating, a double system that Icaroramus perisi may hint at from far back in time.<\/p>\n A design that disappeared<\/p>\n No living beetle kept these split antennae. The researchers read them as a brief experiment, one that selection dropped or that later conditions ruled out.<\/p>\n A few relatives alive today grow a stray third branch on each segment<\/a>, but those are short, blunt bumps. <\/p>\n The four branches on Icaroramus are long and fully formed, closer to real sensory tools.<\/p>\n The team places the beetle in an extinct family, Cretophengodidae, though they add that the fit is uncertain. <\/p>\n At about 0.4 inches long, it carried antennae no beetle has matched in the 100 million years since.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B<\/a>.<\/p>\n Image Credit: YANG Dinghua<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 100 million years ago, a small beetle crawled across a tree in what is now northern Myanmar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-579586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}