CSIRO entomologist Dr John Lawrence admits it was a thrill: the delicate bronze-and-white spiny beetle glittering in the light of his microscope was a living fossil, whose ancestral roots go back almost 200 million years.
"The peculiar look of the animal caught my eye straight away. The unique combination of spines, scales and lack of wings. At first I was puzzled, then I realised it was an ommatid, a member of a family of beetles which dates back to the Jurassic," he recounts.
The beetle, a fresh candidate for the honour of oldest living Australian, is even more ancient than the super-continent Gondwana. Its cousins are found in South America, North America, Europe and Asia, suggesting they originated at the time when all of the earth's contintents formed one vast landmass, known as Pangaea.
The beetle is from the family Omma, and its species is entirely new to science. So far, only two specimens have been discovered, from different sites in the South Australian Mallee, at Calperum-Bookmark Biosphere Reserve and Brookfield Conservation Park.
"We had set up flight-intercept traps to catch flying insects. Below them was a small trough into which the insects fell. This trough sometimes catches flightless animals too, when they walk into it."
That was how the two specimens of the new Omma species came to stumble into the entomological record books.
"We know next to nothing about them, because they are so rare," Dr Lawrence says. "There are a couple of related species which have been found in eastern Australia, and one specimen of an ommatid larva, from Perth."
The Ommatidae are members of the Archostemata, one of the four great suborders which make up the vast order of beetles (Coleoptera). The Archostemata are regarded as the most primitive and ancient.
Fossil relatives of the living beetles discovered in the Mallee
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Contact: Dr. Malcolm Robertson
malcolm.robertson@ento.csiro.au
61-2-6246-4040
CSIRO Australia
28-Sep-1998