Evolution and Antiquity of Mosquitoes

This is a tale of two skeeters: perhaps the two most infamous individuals discovered to date. This predator surpasses peskiness – historian Timothy Winegard gives a ballpark statistic that mosquitoes have caused the deaths of 52 billion people, making them humanity’s most lethal killers by a very long shot.

The first featured fiend is from 130 million years ago, and is shown embedded in amber on the top picture. He came from the then-supercontinent called Gondwanda, around the area of modern Lebanon. Entomologists had known that this was a male specimen, but in 2013, scientists published their data demonstrating that it also had “a long proboscis, sharp denticular jaws and piercing mouthparts,” each indicative of a blood-sucker. This find radically changed what scientists understood about mosquitoes, based on all other samples, which is that only females bite, and they use the blood in their reproductive cycle (not as part of their digestive system). The male mosquitoes just sip nectar from plants. Well, today’s mosquitoes do — but this study shows that this has not always been the case.

And in the second sample, the sucker’s stomach showed something sensational: the preservation of blood! Discovered in the 1980s from an area in Montana called the “Kishenehn Formation,” this specimen was encased in shale rather than amber. Against ridiculous odds, scientists found iron in the 46-million year old mosquito’s abdomen. The iron was found by using the laboratory technique “energy dispersion X-ray spectroscopy” and also a secondary ion mass spectrometer. This finding highlights the ways that scientists can study biomolecules other than DNA to understand past life on earth. (P.S., DNA degrades over time, so this sample won’t launch any _Jurrasic Park_ scenarios.)