An international group of paleontologists has described an aquatic larva of a prehistoric fly that lived in what is now Inner Mongolia, China, about 165 million years ago, and was a bloodsucking parasite of salamanders.

Life reconstruction of Qiyia jurassica attached to a salamander. Image credit: Jun Chen et al.

This unusual parasite, named Qiyia jurassica, represents a stem group of the tabanomorph family Athericidae.

The generic name, Qiyia, is from the Chinese ‘qiyi’ meaning bizarre. The specific name, jurassica, refers to the Jurassic age of the species.

Five fossilized individuals of Qiyia jurassica were recovered from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou beds, near Ningcheng, China. All specimens are carbonaceous impressions on the surface of grey tuffaceous siltstone.

The parasite was 2 – 2.5 cm long, had a gigantic sucking plate and caterpillar-like legs.

Life reconstruction of Qiyia jurassica, lateral view. Image credit: Jun Chen et al.

In the fresh water habitat, it crawled onto passing salamanders, attached itself with its sucking plate, and penetrated the thin skin of the amphibians in order to suck blood from them.

“The parasite lived the life of Reilly. This is because there were many salamanders in the lakes, as fossil finds at the same location near Ningcheng in Inner Mongolia have shown,” said Prof Jes Rust from the University of Bonn’s Steinmann Institute for Geology, Mineralogy and Palaeontology, who is the senior author of the discovery paper published in the journal eLIFE.

Dr Bo Wang from the University of Bonn, a co-author of the discovery, added: “there scientists had also found around 300,000 diverse and exceptionally preserved fossil insects.”

Qiyia jurassica fossil. Image credit: Jun Chen et al.

“No insect exists today with a comparable body shape. That the bizarre larva from the Jurassic has remained so well-preserved to the present day is partly due to the fine-grained mudstone in which the animals were embedded.”

“The finer the sediment, the better the details are reproduced in the fossils. The conditions in the groundwater also prevented decomposition by bacteria,” said co-author Dr Torsten Wappler from the University of Bonn’s Steinmann Institute for Geology, Mineralogy and Palaeontology.

Source: sci.news