Thursday, November 15, 2018
The most recent past posting on this Blog showed some photos of butterflies in the gardens here this summer, plus an interesting research article. If you have not read that article you may want to go back to that posting. I think you will find the article interesting.
Enjoy more butterfly photos from this summer.
Butterflies & Bees
About to land!
Gardens at Waters East
Trust me on this one! There are four butterflies in this photo.
Can you find them???
Sunday, November 11, 2018
Many many visiting butterflies this summer at the Gardens at Waters East. There were days I walked the paths and the butterflies would be all about me. Lots and lots!
At the end of this posting, I included a very interesting article I found on the topic – which came first– butterflies or flowers. Hint – I was surprised!!!
Rethinking evolution: Butterflies came first, flowers came second
Researchers have unearthed the earliest known fossil evidence of an insect of the butterfly order. It reveals that these animals fluttered about 200 million years ago – even before flowering plants came along.
200 million years ago, butterflies didn't look like this. And flowering plants didn't exist at all.
Imagine a brightly yellow-colored butterfly landing on the back of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Well it may have happened. But, okay, this picture is only partly true.
Indeed, it is true that animals of the order Lepidoptera – including butterflies and moths – co-existed with the dinosaurs.
The latest evidence shows that these flying insects evolved more than 200 to 250 million years ago in the Triassic period. That's also when the first dinosaurs appeared.
That means that moths and butterflies are much older than previously thought.
So, what's wrong with the picture we painted at the start?
Well, back then butterflies were unlikely to have been a brightly yellow. It's thought they were not brightly colored at all. They were a browny-grey, more like a moth than a butterfly of today.
"The colorful butterflies that we think are so beautiful came much later," Bas van de Schootbrugge of Utrecht University, Netherlands, tells DW. "They evolved only after dinosaurs became extinct."
A living representative of a primitive moth. A new study suggests they existed 200 million years ago
But no matter which color the fluttering insects had – the discovery that they are older than previously thought has a major implication.
It challenges the modern scientific theory that flowering plants and the insects that feed on them evolved together.
Butterfly scales reveal the truth
Until recently, scientists believed that moths and butterflies, whose descendants still exist today, came into being 130 million years ago – that's the age of the oldest fossil evidence ever found.
But when Bas van de Schootbrugge and his team had a closer look at a drilled core from northern Germany dating back about 200 million years, they were stunned.
The core contained multiple fossilized wing scales showing characteristics of living moths, with a tubular mouthpart used for sucking and feeding.
"It took us quite a while to realize what these particles actually were," says van de Schootbrugge. It took some dedicated work by his student, Timo van Eldijk, and the support of insect-fossil experts, to solve the puzzle, but it took several years.
Butterfly and moth fossils often remain unrecognized, because they are so rare, says Sonja Wedmann, paleontologist and research associate at the Messel pit near Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Wedmann was not involved in the van de Schootbrugge / van Eldijk study. But she explains that because butterfly wings are good at repelling water "they tend to float on a lake instead of sinking to the ground."
And that's why such particles tend to quickly decompose rather than fossilizing and remaining intact for millennia to come.
"Butterfly fossils are always something extraordinary," Wedmann tells DW.
Moths and butterflies belong to the same animal order. Moths are simply not as colorful
The concept of co-evolution on trial
Until now scientists believed tha