A fossil review may change our perception of the Cretaceous period

A fossil insect pavilion was discovered in a deserted mine in the Canadian city of Labrador, prompting paleontologists at the Canadian University of McGill and the Polish Gdansk to identify new types of Cicada hairy insect that lived about a hundred million years ago, the Maculaferrum blaisi insect is the first insect Half-wing discovered at the fossil site Redmond Formation of the Cretaceous period.

According to Alexander Demers-Potvin, a graduate student under the direction of Professor Hans Larsson, director of the Redpath Museum in McGill, one wing was enough to get to know the family the insect belonged to, saying: “We were easily able to prove that the insect She belongs to the family of the Hairy Harvest Ziz (Tettigarctidae) thanks to the veins we noticed on the pavilion. ”

The name of the insect chosen consists of the first two words (Maculaferrum), which is inspired by the Latin word Macula which means speckle due to the pattern found on the wing, and Ferrum, which means iron because of the high content of iron in the red rocks found in the Redmond site, and the second word (Blaisi) She was chosen in honor of Roger A. Blais who conducted the first survey of the site and its fossils in 1957.

Demers-Botvin said that the new discovery gave them a better understanding of the biological diversity of the site's insects during the Cretaceous period prior to the extinction of the dinosaurs. .

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