Tufts alum Richard Knecht (LA ‘08) and Geology Lecturer Jake Benner have made national headlines in the last week after happening upon the oldest full-body trace fossil of a flying insect ever found.
The insect is roughly three inches long, and its impression shows details of anatomical features.
The pair of researchers uncovered the fossil at a site in North Attleborough, Mass., that is packed with rare trace fossils. The find may provide valuable insights into the specialized field of paleoichnology, the study of fossilized behavior that relies on the discovery of trace fossils, which are impressions made on a natural surface by an organism. Tufts geologists began to investigate the location after Knecht and Benner read about it in a master's thesis from 1929.
Knecht, a geology major, was working on his senior project when he and Benner, a senior lecturer and paleontologist, began to investigate the site. Located alongside a strip mall, it is notable because the fossils there are unusually well preserved.
"Usually, everything comes out as small pieces because the rock is so fractured," Benner said. "It's rare that we get a slab of rock this big. Often we have to glue it together."
He said of the fossil, "It's the oldest … indication of behavior of a flying insect that we have."
According to Michael Engel, a premier insect paleontologist at the University of Kansas, descendants of this specimen may still be roaming the earth.
"We can tell from the imprint that it has a very squat position when it lands. Its legs are sprawled and its belly is pressed down. The only group that does that today is the mayfly," Engel said in a press release.
Engel will work with Knecht and Benner in the coming months to study the fossil and better understand its significance.
As promising as the flying insect fossil is, Knecht stressed other undiscovered trace fossils at the North Attleborough location that represent a potential abundance of different species.
"We've gone through about a thousand specimens in this one site. [There are] plants, insects, walking trails of insects, walking trails of amphibians and reptiles," he said. "Some are just fantastically preserved."
The collection and comparison of different fossils will allow Knecht, Benner and other researchers to learn about the environment and interactions between creatures during the late Carboniferous era, about 300 million years ago.
One of the other significant trace fossils found at the site features a v-like impression near two interior trace fossils of feet. This implies that the animal was either sitting or leaning back on its legs and dragging its tail, with part of its body creating the impression, Knecht said.
According to Knecht, this discovery could be groundbreaking because it displays behavior not typical of the creature's time period. Since the specimen was alive when the impression was created, it shows behavioral characteristics in addition to physical traits, one of the main advantages of studying trace fossils, he said.
According to Benner, studying trace fossils also provides more information because the organisms that created the fossils actually lived in the area where the fossils are found. This is not the case with body fossils, like dinosaur bones, that can be swept away by river currents to a completely different location.
"There's a distinct advantage to trace fossils, and that's that they are found on the rocks that represent the depositional environment in which they were made. We have the unique ability to reconstruct the ecological community as it was, right here," he said.
This site is distinct from others in New England because during the Carboniferous era, the surrounding area did not consist of swampy lowlands. Instead, these trace fossils come from an upper layer, called the alluvial fan, commonly thought to be unable to support communities of fossils because of the frequency of floods and sedimentation there.
The Tufts researchers' discovery proves that life persisted in this area and that trace fossils survived to tell its stories.
