Meeting 1208 Minutes

Minutes from the 1208th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Sang il Kim called the 1208th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:35pm on Tuesday January 19 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held on Zoom. Approx. 42 members and guests were in attendance.

New business: None

Old business Jessica Garb, Christina Kwapich, and James C. Trager were approved for membership.

Our speaker wasRicardo Pérez-de la Fuente, Museum Research Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, previously a postdoc at the MCZ. His talk was entitled Fossil Insects: New insights from the deep past.

Quoting Dr.Pérez-de la Fuente: “Novel techniques and new fossil localities – particularly those providing exceptional preservation, such as amber deposits – keep narrowing the gap between extant and extinct insects in the way they are studied and the quality of the data extracted from them.”

Ricardo offered a brief overview of his time at the MCZ, followed by a discussion of his recent work with fossil insects in amber. He began with a study of wing folding in 280 million-year-old earwig relatives, their modern counterparts, and potential technological applications, illustrated in part by origami paper foldings. Second, he discussed recent work with fossil larval neuropterans: found with setae that enable the larva to adorn themselves with a variety of materials, and new observations about “egg bursters”. Next, fossil ticks associated with feathers in Cretaceous Burmese amber led to a series of insights into arthropod-therapod interactions. Ricardo concluded with observations about raptorial forelegs and their multiple functions in fossil and modern insects. The Club especially appreciated that he was willing to accommodate the time difference: for him, the meeting commenced at 12:30AM local time.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:05pm.

Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary