Discovery of New Extinct Family of Insects Sheds Light on Climate Change

The discovery of a new extinct family of insects will help scientists better understand how certain animals respond to global climate change.

Researchers from Simon Fraser University have named the insects after the Eocene epoch called the 'Eorpidae', the period when these insects existed about 50 million years ago, based on fossils found in the Washington state and British Colombia region of North America.

Eoripdae belong to the group of Scorpionflies. "The Eorpidae was part of a cluster of six closely related families in the Eocene, but today this group is reduced to two. Why were these different?" said SFU's Bruce Archibald. "We believe the answer may lay in a combination of two large-scale challenges that would have hit them hard: the evolutionary diversification of a strong competitive group and global climate change."

The global climate 50 million years ago was much warmer, even in the elevated areas where these insects lived.  

Later the climate cooled down with freezing winters. This insect family may not have been able to adapt to these changes and gone extinct.

Archibald explains, "These scorpionfly families appear to have retained their need to inhabit cooler climates, but to persist there, they would need to evolve toleration for cold winters, a feat that only the two surviving families may have accomplished.

 "Understanding the evolutionary history of these insects adds another piece to the puzzle of how animal communities change as climate does-but in this case, when an interval of global warming ends," he adds.

 The study was published in the Journal of Paleontology.