Who I was, covered up in leaves

[sovay]

My mother heard on the radio this afternoon that butterfly fossils prove that the proboscis evolved a full geologic period before flowering plants did.

Me: "So what were they eating with them?"

My mother: "Aha!"

(She's suspecting carrion.)

Comments

Thanks for a cool link

[redbird]

So I did a little googling. The authors of the paper think those proboscises evolved originally to drink water, and some butterflies and moths then started using them partly to get nectar from horsetails. There's also an offhand reference (as to something that people in the field already know) to "increased herbivory" of insects, with specifics about leaf-eating.

Meanwhile, Scientific American also has people saying "maybe not" about significant ancient diversification of Lepidoptera, but it's not clear whether they mean "no, you're trying to get too much from a few fossil scales" or "yes, these three lineages go back to the end of the Triassic, but that doesn't mean there were lots of moths and butterflies flying around the early Jurassic landscape."

Thanks for the additional information!

[sovay]

The authors of the paper think those proboscises evolved originally to drink water, and some butterflies and moths then started using them partly to get nectar from horsetails.

I can see that. I just also see my mother's point that if you need liquid sources of nutrition, salts, minerals, etc., you could do a lot worse than damply decaying animal matter.

Meanwhile, Scientific American also has people saying "maybe not" about significant ancient diversification of Lepidoptera, but it's not clear whether they mean "no, you're trying to get too much from a few fossil scales" or "yes, these three lineages go back to the end of the Triassic, but that doesn't mean there were lots of moths and butterflies flying around the early Jurassic landscape."

Well, since I didn't even know butterfly fossils were a thing before yesterday, I look forward to seeing how the debate evolves.