A Giant Prehistoric "Bug": Sinojapyx giganteus

Publication Info:

Transcript:

Yehao Wang et al., A giant Jurassic hunter: the earliest dipluran and its implications for hexapod body pattern evolution, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2026.1207.

Meet Sinojapyx giganteus! The newly named giant dipluran (an insect relative) from Jurassic China. This is the largest fossil dipluran ever discovered and it's weird anatomy could potentially end up affecting the way paleontologists look at the arthropod family tree!

Episode 362

Notes:

There's a new fossil species. So, picture a giant earwig, then give it fangs. Oh, okay, not that giant. Scale it down a little bit. So, this is a dipluran, and while it may look a lot like an earwig or a pincher bug, it isn't. Diplurans are hexapods, but they're not even insects. They're relatively small, ranging anywhere from 2 to 10 mm in length, with even the largest ones today reaching about 2 in. They first show up in the fossil record in the late middle Jurassic, potentially dating back into the Carboniferous. That's a little iffy, though. And one of their defining features is that they don't have visible mouth parts, and that matters because within hexapods, insects famously have very visible mouth parts, and which has led paleontologists to believe that the ancestral form of hexapods most likely had hidden mouth parts, later evolving actual insect anatomy. But, that could be changing. Meet Sinojapyx giganteus from Jurassic China, roughly 165 million years ago. Now, meet Sinojapyx's mouth parts. That sounded weird. It it Anyway, you can probably notice something, because its mouth parts are very visible, meaning that what would normally be the headline, which is that this 2-in long dipluran is the largest fossil dipluran ever discovered, real headline now is that the ancestral state of hexapods may have had visible mouth parts, which could significantly impact the arthropod family tree as we know it. Obviously, more research is going to have to be done. This is something that's going to take a long time to confirm. But, if you want more information, here's the source.