LONDON: 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.
