Chinese and foreign scholars "Proc. Royal Soc. B" discovered firefly ancestors 100 million years ago

Bioluminescence phenomenon widely exists in all kinds of organisms

In the firefly branch, except for the most basal part of the family, the species of Firefly, Firefly, and Female Firefly are relatively soft, and the females of some groups also have the phenomenon of juvenile persistence, but this is why This makes it difficult for species in this group to be preserved as fossils

Recently, research assistant Li Yanda, associate researcher Cai Chenyang of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and others have cooperated with colleagues from Palacky University in the Czech Republic, the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and the Sun Yat-sen University in China.

Researchers found a well-preserved male specimen of Cretophengodes azari Li (Kundrata, Tihelka & Cai, 2021) in Burmese amber in the mid-Cretaceous period (about 100 million years ago)

Sections 1–3 of Chalky fluorescens have a light-colored bright area on the abdomen, which can be explained as its light-emitting organs, and its location is very similar to some species in the female fluoresceae

The discovery of the Chalky Firefly also provides new insights into the soft somatization and biogeographic distribution of this group

This research was funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China

Paper information: Yan-Da Li, Robin Kundrata, Erik Tihelka, Zhenhua Liu, Diying Huang, Chenyang Cai* (2021) Cretophengodidae, a new Cretaceous beetle family sheds light on the evolution of bioluminescence.