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The Lepidoptera fossil record encompasses all butterflies and moths that lived before recorded history. The fossil record for Lepidoptera is lacking in comparison to other winged species, and tending not to be as common as some other insects in the habitats that are most conducive to fossilization , such as lakes and ponds, and their juvenile ...
The fossil was found by J. F. Jackson (1894–1966) of Charmouth, and later purchased by the British Museum of Natural History. [1] The fossil of Archaeolepis was not studied until the 1980s, when it was described as a type of early lepidopteran, [1] the family that includes butterflies and moths.
Moths evolved long before butterflies; moth fossils have been found that may be 190 million years old. Both types of Lepidoptera are thought to have co-evolved with flowering plants, mainly because most modern species, both as adults and larvae, feed on flowering plants.
Ithonidae, commonly called moth lacewings and giant lacewings, is a small family of winged insects of the insect order Neuroptera. The family contains a total of ten living genera, and over a dozen extinct genera described from fossils. The modern Ithonids have a notably disjunct distribution, while the extinct genera had a more global range ...
Fossil Hepialoidea appear to be few. [2] Prohepialus (possibly Hepialidae ) has been described from the about 35-million-year-old Bembridge marls of Isle of Wight . [ 3 ] A mid- Miocene hepialoid fossil is also known from China .
The earliest known butterfly fossils are from the mid Eocene epoch, between 40-50 million years ago. [1] [dubious – discuss] Their development is closely linked to the evolution of flowering plants, since both adult butterflies and caterpillars feed on flowering plants.
Sphingidites is an extinct and monotypic moth genus in the family Sphingidae. Its only species is Sphingidites weidneri. It is a compression fossil of a prepupal larva. Both the genus and species were first described by Kurt Kernbach in 1967. The fossil was found at Willershausen clay pit in Germany and it was dated to the Pliocene. [1] [2]
The insect order Lepidoptera consists of moths and butterflies (43 superfamilies). [1] Most moths are night-flying, while the butterflies (superfamily Papilionoidea ) are the mainly day-flying. Within Lepidoptera as a whole, the groups listed below before Glossata contain a few basal families accounting for less than 200 species; the bulk of ...