Science1 publisherNot yet confirmed elsewhere2 min readPublished
Planthopper trapped in amber 99 million years ago carried bendable mouthparts nearly twice its length
Tel Aviv and Nanjing researchers describe Cretodorus noonoo, a 99-million-year-old amber planthopper with mouthparts nearly twice its body length. Scans of the folded mouthparts and the lack of pollen point to a sap feeder that bent them into bark cracks.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- The team studied fossils of Neazoniidae, an ancient planthopper family, including 13 specimens preserved in Kachin amber from Myanmar.
- Micro-CT scans showed the dense transverse folds on the mouthparts are part of their structure, likely letting them bend without kinking or collapsing.
- A tip with two grooved lobes likely opened during feeding to brace the mouthpart against the walls of a bark crack.
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Why it matters
- constraint With no living relative carrying the folded design, its bending and anchoring functions cannot be checked on a living animal and rest on fossil anatomy and hose analogies.
- constraint A sap diet deep in bark is inferred from shape and from missing pollen, so the claimed niche beyond rigid-mouthed insects stays a hypothesis until feeding is observed in a fossil.
- precedent If thick bark favoured long mouthparts in several unrelated groups, Cretaceous forest structure becomes a variable other amber studies can test across insect lineages.
- capability Scanning inside amber fossils lets researchers judge whether surface ridges do mechanical work, which moves a description of shape toward an argument about function.
Living relatives of these planthoppers feed with a simple needle that pierces plant tissue and draws out fluid [5]. The study first had to show that a mouthpart nearly twice the body's length could bend without kinking, and the team offers two separate lines of evidence [2]. The internal scans test the structure directly. Folds built into the wall are what let a corrugated hose curve and stay open, and the scans found the folds were part of the wall [6].
The second line of evidence is posture. Several specimens were trapped with their mouthparts bent. Because resin fixed each insect where it was caught, the researchers take the curve as a shape the living animal could hold [7]. A bend at death shows how far the tube could curve. The phys.org account of the paper in Insects does not say how many of the 13 Kachin specimens are Cretodorus noonoo, or how many of them show the bend [3][4].
The feeding claim is a step further from the data. A long, flexible proboscis invites comparison with butterflies, and the researchers call the resemblance superficial [10]. Their reasons come from anatomy and from something missing: the mouthparts are a backward-pointing piercing tool, and the team found no convincing pollen across many fossils [11]. Missing pollen counts against pollination, though on its own it does not establish sap.
The sap hypothesis comes from fitting the parts together. A tube that can snake through narrow bark cracks could steer the piercing organs toward deep vascular tissue [12]. A grooved, two-lobed tip that likely spread open during feeding would brace it against the crack walls, the way a wall anchor expands in a drilled hole [13]. The niche the researchers propose is specific: food out of reach for insects with more rigid mouthparts. The source presents it as what the researchers believe [2].
The wider idea concerns whole forests. Long or corrugated feeding structures turn up in several unrelated Cretaceous insect groups. The researchers raise the possibility that forests rich in thick-barked trees favoured insects that could reach deeper tissue [14]. When unrelated lineages evolve similar tools, a shared pressure is a reasonable guess. Bark thickness in those forests is a separate measurement, and it is the one that would test the link.
Whatever these insects drank, the design has disappeared: no living relative is known to carry it [8]. The species is named after Noo-Noo, the vacuum cleaner in Teletubbies, whose long flexible hose the mouthpart resembles [9].
What to watch
- Whether the full Insects paper reports how many of the 13 Kachin specimens are Cretodorus noonoo and how many preserve bent mouthparts.
- Bark thickness measurements from Cretaceous forests of Kachin age, which would test the thick-bark explanation directly.
- An amber specimen caught with its mouthparts inside bark, or with preserved gut contents, would turn the sap diet into an observation.