• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Rare Jurassic-Era Giant Not Seen For Half A Century Found At… Walmart?

March 3, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

A Jurassic-era lacewing that’s been MIA for 50 years was plucked from inside the façade of an Arkansas Walmart. It’s the first record of the species ever in the state, and the first seen in half a century since the species mysteriously disappeared from North America back in the 1950s.

The Walmart-dwelling specimen was actually first found back in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2020 after teaching an online course that director of Penn State’s Insect Identification Lab Dr Michael Skvarla realized what he was looking at. The giant insect was, in fact, Polystoechotes punctata, a giant Jurassic-era lacewing.

Advertisement

“I remember it vividly, because I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building,” said Skvarla in a statement. “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.”

The record-breaking discovery unfurled in real time for a group of students enrolled in Entomology 432: Insect Biodiversity and Evolution at Penn State. During a Zoom lab Skvarla was demonstrating the features of an “antlion” specimen when the penny started to drop that some of them didn’t match up.

“We were watching what Dr Skvarla saw under his microscope and he’s talking about the features and then just kinda stops,” said Codey Mathis, a doctoral candidate in entomology at Penn State. “We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing.” 

“I still remember the feeling. It was so gratifying to know that the excitement doesn’t dim, the wonder isn’t lost. Here we were making a true discovery in the middle of an online lab course.”

Advertisement

The discovery of Polystoechotes after its apparent eradication in North America demonstrates there may still be relic populations yet to be discovered in the region. That it was found in an urban area of Fayetteville, Arkansas, supports the suggestion that the area is a biodiversity hotspot, sitting within the Ozark mountains.

Despite this, it’s a relatively understudied area when it comes to biodiversity research, and so could contain a treasure trove of rare, thought-extinct, or as of yet undiscovered species within its habitats. 

“Discovery doesn’t always hold that same kind of grasp on people that maybe it did 100 years ago,” said doctoral candidate Louis Nastasi, who was present in Skvarla’s live Zoom reveal of the giant lacewing. “But a finding like this really highlights that even in a run-of-the-mill situation, there are still a tremendous number of discoveries to make about insects.”

The study was published in Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Chinese #MeToo plaintiff heads back to court for what could be last time
  2. Experts tip Tsikhanouskaya, Thunberg or reporters for Nobel Peace Prize
  3. America’s Underground “Lost Sea” Is So Vast It’s Never Been Fully Explored
  4. Atomic Hydrogen Detected In Most Distant Galaxy Yet

Source Link: Rare Jurassic-Era Giant Not Seen For Half A Century Found At... Walmart?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Why Do Many Large Language Models Give The Same Answer To This “Random” Number Query?
  • Adidas Jabulani: The World Cup Football So Bad NASA Decided To Study It
  • Beluga Whales Shake Their Blob-Like Melons To Say Hello And Even Woo A Mate, But How?
  • Gravitational Wave Detected From Largest Black Hole Merger Yet: “It Presents A Real Challenge To Our Understanding Of Black Hole Formation”
  • At Over 100 Years Of Age, The World’s Oldest Elephant Passes Away In India
  • Ancient Human DNA Reveals Earliest Zoonotic Diseases Appeared 6,500 Years Ago
  • Boys Are Better At Math? That Could Be Because School Favors Them Over Girls
  • Looptail G: Most People Can’t Recognize A Letter You Have Seen Millions Of Times
  • 24-Million-Year-Old Protein Fragments Are Oldest Ever Recovered, A Robot Listened To Spoken Instructions And Performed Surgery, And Much More This Week
  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version