The discovery of a new species of moth is being hailed as one of the most exciting finds in entomology over the past four decades. Named Enigma, the 10 mm long moth that was found on Kangaroo Island in South Australia is so primitive that it is being considered a living dinosaur by experts and has led scientists to redraw its family tree.
Finding the Aenigmatinea glatzella, which is marked by iridescent gold and purple wings, is the first time since the 1970s that scientists were able to identify a new family of primitive moths.
In a study published in the journal Systematic Entomology on Jan. 6, Ted Edwards from the Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO in Australia and colleagues reported the results of the DNA analysis of the newly discovered moth, which revealed that the evolution of the moth and butterfly is more complex than previously believed.
Edwards said that the results indicate that the tongues in moths and butterflies evolved more than once. While the Enigma moth does not have a tongue, the researchers said that its earlier ancestors did. Edwards said that the primitive moth exhibited how the development of the musculature in the moths' tongue occurred independently twice.
"While the discovery of this new moth strengthens the evolutionary relationships between other primate moth families, it also suggests that tongues evolved in moths and butterflies more than once," Edwards said.
He also said that the moth retained a number of other structural features such as the wing mechanism that is linked with earlier moth species that thrived between 40 to 50 million years earlier, suggesting that the ancestral line of the insect has continued without many changes in its basic structures.
"The discovery of Aenigmatinea not only lends additional support to the challenges of the previous 'near-consensus' phylogeny of basal lepidopterans from the recent molecular analyses, but also reveals that early Lepidoptera evolution was even more complex than implied in these studies, in as much as it requires a considerable number of additional ad hoc assumptions of homoplasy to be made," the researchers wrote in their study.
The moth was first found in 2009 by Richard Glatz, who found them on cypress pine trees. It took some time, however, before Glatz sought advice from Edwards. More specimens of the moth were collected in 2012 and 2013 before it was finally confirmed to be a new species.
