Alienopterix santonicus was found preserved in a piece of ajkaite, a unique Late Cretaceous type of amber from western Hungary.
“Cockroaches are one of the most dominant insect orders in Paleozoic and Mesozoic ecosystems,” said Márton Szabó, a paleontologist at the Hungarian Natural History Museum and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, and his colleagues.
“Appearing in the Late Carboniferous, they are considered as ancestors of termites, mantises and chresmodids.”
“In the course of their 320 million-year-long evolution, cockroaches adapted to a wide range of ecosystems and developed a high degree of ecological, behavioral and morphological diversity.”
“During the course of their evolution, there are now aquatic, pollinating, decomposing, jumping, mimicking, camouflaging, translucent, aposematic, parasitic, predatory, poisonous, eusocial, virus infection-symptomatic, holoptic, pectinate and bipectinate antennate, cavernicolous, injecting-ovipositor, brachypterous, cranefly-like and beetle-like forms.”
“Fossil cockroaches are abundant, documented across numerous amber localities of various age. Most notable include North Myanmar, Baltic, Dominican and Mexican amber.”
A piece of ajkaite amber with Alienopterix santonicus was found in an unknown shaft of the Ajka-Csingervölgy coal minery in Hungary.
“Ajkaite is known to be rich in arthropod inclusions since the middle of the 20th century,” the paleontologists said.
“This Late Cretaceous type of amber is found in the Ajka Coal Formation, whose outcrops were discovered in the 1860s within the Ajka-Csinger Valley.”
“The valley is situated approximately 4 km (2.5 miles) southeast from the city of Ajka in Bakony Mountains, western Hungary.”
Alienopterix santonicus lived during the Santonian age of the Late Cretaceous epoch, between 86 and 83 million years ago.
It belonged to Alienopteridae, an extinct cockroach family known only from the Cretaceous of Gondwana and the Cenozoic of…
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