Longtime Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck shares a report from CBS News: A 2012 trip to a Fayetteville, Arkansas, Walmart to pick up some milk turned out to be one for the history books. A giant bug that stopped a scientist in his tracks as he walked into the store and he ended up taking home turned out to be a rare Jurassic-era flying insect. Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State University’s Insect Identification Lab, found the mysterious bug — an experience that he says he remembers “vividly.”<\/p>\n
“I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building,” he said in a press release from Penn State. “I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade.”<\/p>\n
[I]n the fall of 2020 when he was teaching an online course on insect biodiversity and evolution, Skvarla was showing students the bug and suddenly realized it wasn’t what he originally thought. He and his students then figured out what it might be — live on a Zoom call. “We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope and he’s talking about the features and then just kinda stops,” one of his students Codey Mathis said. “We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing.” A clear indicator of this identification was the bug’s wingspan. It was about 50 millimeters — nearly 2 inches — a span that the team said made it clear the insect was not an antlion. His team’s molecular analysis on the bug has been published in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.<\/p>\n
theshowmecanuck captioned: “To be fair, he said he didn’t know what it was so [he] just collected it and took it home, and then figured it out later. My thought that I added to the title was because of this quote in the story (which tickled my cynicism in humanity): “It could have been 100 years since it was even in this area — and it’s been years since it’s been spotted anywhere near it…”<\/p>\n
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Longtime Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck shares a report from CBS News: A 2012 trip to a Fayetteville, Arkansas, Walmart to pick up some milk turned out to be one for the history books. A giant bug that stopped a scientist in … Continue reading
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\nSource: Slashdot – Scientist Finds Rare Jurassic Era Bug At Arkansas Walmart, Kills It and Puts It On a Pin<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"