(Image: O. Béthoux)

This is the earliest known plant-mimicking stick insect, its fragile body preserved for 126 million years in the dusty rocks of north-east China.

Cretophasmomima melanogramma is the latest discovery from the Jehol Biota, a dinosaur-era community preserved in incredible detail – perhaps because a Pompeii-style catastrophe swamped the area in volcanic ash. The Jehol Biota is famous for its fossils of feathered dinosaurs and early birds. Their penchant for gobbling up invertebrates may have helped drive the evolution of the stick insect’s plant mimicry.

Today’s stick and leaf insects (Phasmatodea) usually mimic flowering plants. We know that flowers were around in the Jehol Biota, but C. melanogramma seems to have had a different template in mind.


There are stripes running down its fore- and hind-wings. When these wings were folded over its body, it would have made the insect look like a long, vertically striped tongue. As it happens, vertically striped tongue-like plant structures were found in the Jehol Biota in 2001. They belonged to the Ginkgophyta, a group of plants now extinct except for the Ginkgo biloba, a well-known living fossil, often used in traditional medicine.

“We are very confident about this mimicking pair,” says co-discoverer Olivier Béthoux at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. “Both the insect and the plant show a very peculiar coloration pattern, and both were recovered from the same locality.”

Today there are at least 3000 species of stick and leaf insect, proof that imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, but also a way to succeed in life.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091290