While looking for new insect fossils, paleontologist Bruce Archibald of the Royal British Columbia (BC) Museum was able to find an ancient giant wasp at the BC's southern interior.
Archibald, who was also a research associate with Harvard and Simon Fraser Universities, was searching the McAbee fossil beds when he discovered a rock with a near perfectly preserved giant horntail wood-wasp. The species, which was estimated to be 53 million years old, was dubbed Ypresiosirex orthosemos.
The McAbee fossil bed is a designated heritage site in the province where specimens of different types of insects are often discovered. The government hopes to add more opportunities for the public to explore and make its own discoveries on these sites.
The wasp was seven centimeters long and is one of the new species identified by Archibald and Alexandr Rasnitsyn of the Russian Academy of Sciences. While the wasp may sound quite big, it is actually only minimally larger than modern day wasps.
Modern horntail wood-wasps bore tunnels in wood to grow fungi that serve as their food source, eventually killing the host tree due to the combination of the fungi's poisons and the wasp's own deadly secretions.
"The interesting part is that it's so close to its modern relatives," Archibald said of the wasps that he described as the forest's big pests. "When you put it in a forest 53 million years ago with very different conditions ... you can see how their community responds."
Archibald said that discovering the new species can give researchers more knowledge into how the modern world adapted after the dinosaurs became extinct. The presence of ancient wood-wasps also proved that the trees that provide food for modern wasps like pine and cedar trees already existed 53 million years ago, giving researchers clues on what plants and animals came together during certain seasons and climates.
Based on its location, the ancient horntail wood-wasp must have preferred a temperate climate.
"What we're seeing is an early version of our modern world," Archibald said.
The fossils are currently being kept at the Royal B.C. Museum, and the discovery of this wasp species and two others are featured in the Canadian Entomologist journal.
