With all those factors in play, it\u2019s pretty rare to find pristine fossils of animals\u2014especially with patterns intact. While the fossilization process does allow for some patterns and body features to remain as fossil impressions, what scientists often find are incomplete, distorted, or sometimes outright missing. It\u2019s all these odds stacked against a fossil that, when grouped together, make this startling 49 million-year-old beetle fossil discovery from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, published in the journal Papers in Palaeontology<\/em>, all the more striking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scientists had actually already found this fossil before, all the way back in 1995, from the Green River Formation fossil deposits\u2014a group of ancient Eocene-epoch lakebeds spanning Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, in the United States. It had originally been classified as a long-horned beetle, from the genus Cerambycidae<\/em>. After a second glance, however, Dr. Frank-Thorsten Krell, the museum\u2019s senior curator of entomology and lead author of the study in question, started to question whether the beautiful beetle fossil might belong to a different group of beetles after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the fossil\u2019s distinct short and stout hind legs, the researchers reassigned the beetle to another group of insects. As the curator of Luxembourg\u2019s National Museum of Natural History and study co-author Dr. Francesco Vitali put it: \u201cWe looked at all the preserved details. It was the beetle\u2019s crooked legs\u2014its curved hind <\/em>tibiae\u2014that gave away its true identity: a frog-legged leaf beetle.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The beetle now belongs to the beetle family Sagrinae<\/em>, and now possesses a different scientific name: Pulchritudo attenboroughi<\/em>, or \u201cAttenborough\u2019s Beauty.\u201d When discovering a new species of animal, fossilized or otherwise, scientists get the chance to name the said new animal, and they often pull inspiration from all sorts of places; in this case, Dr. Krell immediately thought of one of his personal heroes: Sir David Attenborough, English naturalist and broadcaster. Attenborough is perhaps most famous the world over for his nature documentary work; Dr. Krell immediately thought of the naturalist because of the role he played in inspiring him, his family, and millions of other people across the world. According to Dr. Krell: “Nobody imparts the grandeur and beauty of nature more impressively than Sir David. This fossil, unique in its preservation and beauty, is an apt specimen to honor such a great man.” (<\/em>Attenborough is also a well-known fan of collecting fossils; he has been doing so since his childhood.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n As of now, it remains unclear as to how exactly a 49 million-year-old beetle fossil retained so much of its patterns in life with such startling contrast and clarity. It is hypothesized that the animal must have died then sunk down to the lakebed, an area likely to contain fine particles such as silt or clay. According to Dr. Krell, the fine particles on the lakebed must have played a major role in allowing such pristine fossilization; after all, the beetle needed to have been compressed beneath sediment without decomposing, so an oxygen-poor lakebed is precisely the environment it needed to fossilize so well. How these clay or silt particles managed to retain the patterns on its body and wings with such clarity, however, remains a target for further study.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBibliography<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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