''Burmaleon'' is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

genus Genus (; : genera ) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family (taxonomy), family as used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In bino ...

lacewing The Hemerobiiformia are a suborder of insects in the order Neuroptera that include most of the lacewings, antlions and their allies. The phylogeny of the Neuroptera was explored in 2014 using mitochondrial DNA sequences. The results indicate t ...

in the family Osmylidae known from fossils found in Asia. The genus contains a single species, ''Burmaleon magnificus''.

History and classification

When first described, ''R. cratoensis'' was known from a pair of fossil adults, the

holotype A holotype (Latin: ''holotypus'') is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of s ...

number "HUANG-BP-B-4220" and

paratype In zoology and botany, a paratype is a specimen of an organism that helps define what the scientific name of a species and other taxon actually represents, but it is not the holotype (and in botany is also neither an isotype (biology), isotype ...

number "HUANG-NIGP163028". At the time of the insects' description, the two specimens were residing in the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, in

Nanjing Nanjing or Nanking is the capital of Jiangsu, a province in East China. The city, which is located in the southwestern corner of the province, has 11 districts, an administrative area of , and a population of 9,423,400. Situated in the Yang ...

. Both the winged adults are preserved as inclusions in transparent chunks of yellow

Burmese amber Burmese amber, also known as Burmite or Kachin amber, is amber from the Hukawng Valley in northern Myanmar. The amber is dated to around 100 million years ago, during the latest Albian to earliest Cenomanian ages of the mid-Cretaceous period. Th ...

shaped and polished before study. The

amber Amber is fossilized tree resin. Examples of it have been appreciated for its color and natural beauty since the Neolithic times, and worked as a gemstone since antiquity."Amber" (2004). In Maxine N. Lurie and Marc Mappen (eds.) ''Encyclopedia ...

specimen was recovered from the amber deposits of Hukawng Valley,

Kachin State Kachin State (; Jingpho language, Kachin: ) is the northernmost administrative divisions of Myanmar, state of Myanmar. It is bordered by China to the north and east (Tibet Autonomous Region, Tibet and Yunnan, respectively), Shan State to the sou ...

in Myanmar. The specific origin location for the fossils is unidentified since the amber pieces were obtained from traders after mining. Burmese amber has been radiometrically dated using U- Pb isotopes, yielding an age of approximately 98.79 ± 0.62 million years old, close to the

Aptian The Aptian is an age (geology), age in the geologic timescale or a stage (stratigraphy), stage in the stratigraphic column. It is a subdivision of the Early Cretaceous, Early or Lower Cretaceous epoch (geology), Epoch or series (stratigraphy), S ...

–

Cenomanian The Cenomanian is, in the International Commission on Stratigraphy's (ICS) geological timescale, the oldest or earliest age (geology), age of the Late Cretaceous epoch (geology), Epoch or the lowest stage (stratigraphy), stage of the Upper Cretace ...

boundary, in the earliest Cenomanian. The fossils were described in a 2016 paper by an international team of paleontologists led by Justine Myskowiak. The genus name is a combination of ''Burma'', referring to the type location in Burmese amber, and ''leon'', a common suffix name for myrmeleontoid insects. They coined the

specific epithet In Taxonomy (biology), taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin gramm ...

''magnificus'' in reference to the great detail of preservation seen in the fossils.

Description

The species have a full body length ranging between approximately , and both are mostly complete. On the

, the whole individual is preserved except three of the legs, while the

has only body, antennae and wings present. The heads are wider than long, with medium compound eyes positioned on the sides and no

ocelli A simple eye or ocellus (sometimes called a pigment pit) is a form of eye or an optical arrangement which has a single lens without the sort of elaborate retina that occurs in most vertebrates. These eyes are called "simple" to distinguish the ...

present. The antennae are thread- like in appearance and at least half as long as the fore-wings. The legs are slender and attached to the long

prothorax The prothorax is the foremost of the three segments in the thorax of an insect, and bears the first pair of legs. Its principal sclerites (exoskeletal plates) are the pronotum (dorsal), the prosternum ( ventral), and the propleuron (lateral) on ...

, with all the legs showing distinct apical spurs on the tibia. The long forewings are a

hyaline A hyaline substance is one with a glassy appearance. The word is derived from , and . Histopathology Hyaline cartilage is named after its glassy appearance on fresh gross pathology. On light microscopy of H&E stained slides, the extracellula ...

with a brown pterostigma and brown venation, but no color patterning. There are small trichosors present along the apical rear edges of the forewings, but unlike the modern genus '' Gumilla'', nygmata are not present on any of the wings. The Rs vein of all four wings have six distinct branches and the positioning of the first branch is near the center point of the wing. In the fore-wings the area between the costa vein and the ScP is narrow as is the area between the costal margin and the combined subcostal plus radial veins.

References

External links

* {{Taxonbar, from=Q23057881 Neuroptera genera Monotypic prehistoric insect genera Cretaceous insects of Asia Fossil taxa described in 2016 Burmese amber Cenomanian genera Late Cretaceous insects Insects described in 2016