Giant Jurassic-Era Insect Discovered at Arkansas Walmart — But Man 'Forgot About It for Almost a Decade'
Michael Skvarla/Penn State
A giant insect that hasn't been seen in North America in several decades turned up at a Walmart in Arkansas.
The Jurassic-Era bug — known as a Polystoechotes punctata, or giant lacewing — was spotted at a Fayetteville store in 2012, according to a press release from Pennsylvania State University.
Michael Skvarla, director of the Insect Identification Lab at Penn State, had stopped at the store to purchase some milk when he saw the bug on the side of the building. Skvarla, then a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas, said he grabbed the bug and completed his shopping "with it between my fingers."
"I thought it looked interesting," Skvarla added. "I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade."
Skvarla had no idea he accidentally stumbled upon a giant lacewing until the fall of 2020, when COVID-19 led many schools and institutions to offer remote courses, according to the release.
The professor was teaching an online course about Insect Biodiversity and Evolution when he realized he had originally mislabeled the lacewing, which he previously believed was an "antlion."
Codey Mathis, a doctoral candidate in entomology at Penn State, said the class came to a standstill when Skvarla came to the realization.
"I still remember the feeling," Mathis said in Monday's press release. "It was so gratifying to know that the excitement doesn't dim, the wonder isn't lost. Here we were making a true discovery in the middle of an online lab course."
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Skvarla and his colleagues eventually confirmed that the specimen was indeed a giant lacewing — which mysteriously disappeared from eastern North America in the 1950s.
This is the first record of the insect in Arkansas, according to Monday's release. It may have been a century since the bug was last seen in the region, Skvarla said.
It remains unclear where the insect actually came from, but it likely wasn't far. Skvarla said the bug may have flown "a few hundred meters" from its original location.
"The next closest place that they've been found was 1,200 miles away," the expert said, "so very unlikely it would have traveled that far."
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Giant lacewings once had "a huge geographic range," stretching from Alaska on the west end to Panama in the east, according to Penn State's press release.
Experts are still puzzled by the insect's disappearance from eastern North America. Among the possible factors are increased amounts of "artificial light and pollution of urbanization," forest fire suppression and "the introduction of non-native predators" to the local environment.
The area is also understudied in terms of biodiversity, Skvarla said. Dozens of endemic insect species are known to live in the Ozarks, where Fayetteville is located.
"This combination makes the region an ideal place for a large, showy insect to hide undetected," said Skvarla and J. Ray Fisher, who co-authored a paper about Skvarla's lacewing discovery.
