this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah, but 230 million years is/would be new info & older than thought.

Edit: o shit ... with wings.
sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0895981125002469

This specimen comes from a communal latrine in the lower Carnian deposits (∼236 Ma) of the Chañares Formation, La Rioja Province, northwestern Argentina. The tiny fossil scales are hollow and ornamented, which is a synapomorphy of Lepidoptera and suggests that they could belong to this group. If this is the case, the Chañares scales would partially fill the temporal mismatch between phylogenomic date and the fossil evidence of butterflies and moths because they preceded the previously oldest lepidopteran record by c. 35 million years. Moreover, the scales have a combination of features present in early diverging glossatan lepidopterans. The inclusion of the temporal data provided by the Chañares scales into an updated temporal calibration of lepidopteran phylogeny shows that the proboscis, a key evolutionary novelty for the group (Glossata), evolved between c. 260–244 Ma. Thus, the proboscis-bearing lepidopterans would be part of the repertory of new plants and animals that diversified during the aftermath of the EPME.

[–] ryedaft 3 points 4 days ago

Well the molecular clocks put the divergence back to about 100 Ma to 66 Ma years ago.

From Wikipedia:

Molecular clock estimates suggest that butterflies originated sometime in the Late Cretaceous, but only significantly diversified during the Cenozoic,[10][1] with one study suggesting a North American origin for the group.[1