Meet Cherasisyra elegans — A Cretaceous Pollinator Frozen in Time
Scientists from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Peretti Museum Foundation (PMF) have discovered a new species of ancient lacewing preserved in 100-million-year-old Cretaceous amber from Myanmar. Barely six millimeters long, Cherasisyra elegans was built to drink nectar — making it one of the earliest known insect pollinators on Earth. This tiny creature helped trigger the explosive spread of flowering plants that shaped the food chains leading from dinosaurs to us.
The Invention That Built the Food Chain
The giant leaps in the history of life do not always come from giant animals. Roughly 100 million years ago, in the middle of the Cretaceous period, the most consequential partnership in the history of terrestrial ecosystems was taking shape — not between mighty dinosaurs, but between tiny insects and the first flowering plants.
Flowering plants discovered a trick that would change the world: instead of casting pollen to the wind, they recruited insects to carry it from flower to flower, offering energy-rich nectar in return. This cooperation — pollination — was a biological invention of staggering consequence. It allowed angiosperms to reproduce with dramatically greater efficiency, triggering an explosive diversification that would carpet the planet in flowering vegetation.
From that base, an entire world was reshaped. Flowers became fruits and seeds in ever-greater abundance. Fruits and seeds fed the herbivores. Herbivores sustained the predators. The food chain — from insects to small vertebrates, from grazing dinosaurs to the tyrannosaurs that hunted them, and eventually to the mammals that inherited the Earth — was profoundly shaped by this overlooked first player: the tiny insect pollinator visiting a flower.
A Puzzle Piece Frozen in Time
Now, scientists from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York and the Dr Peretti Museum Foundation (PMF) in Switzerland have found one of those puzzle pieces. Preserved in a drop of clear amber from the Hkamti mines of northern Myanmar, Cherasisyra elegans is a newly described genus of lacewing — barely six millimeters long — with elongated, straw-like mouthparts built for one purpose: drinking nectar from Cretaceous flowers.
Two exquisitely preserved females were found side by side in a single piece of amber, their hairy bodies and delicate wing venation captured in extraordinary detail. Published in the journal Palaeoentomology by Dr Michael S. Engel (AMNH and Distinguished Curator at PMF) and Dr Adolf M. Peretti (PMF / GRS Gemresearch Swisslab), this discovery is a tangible fragment of the Cretaceous pollination ecosystem — a small part of an immense machine that was, at that very moment in deep time, building the modern world.
"What looks like a random discovery was a lifetime of collection, and every piece we found might contain a treasure — never underestimate it."
— Dr Adolf M. Peretti, Director, Dr Peretti Museum Foundation
"When Adi and I went through thousands of samples at PMF for an entire week, we knew there had to be a surprise — and a surprise it was. Coming from completely different backgrounds and lives, our joint research projects, now and into the future, will inevitably produce breakthroughs."
— Dr Michael S. Engel, AMNH / Distinguished Curator, PMF
What Is This Animal?
Cherasisyra elegans belongs to the Sisyridae, commonly known as spongillaflies, a family within the insect order Neuroptera. Today's spongillaflies are remarkable: their larvae are among the only insects that feed exclusively on freshwater sponges. During the Cretaceous, however, certain lineages evolved a radically different adult lifestyle — developing long, tube-shaped mouthparts to drink nectar. Covered head to thorax in dense, shaggy hairs, they were perfectly equipped to trap and transport pollen as they moved from flower to flower.
Small but Crucial
Every fossil discovery is a puzzle piece. Individually, each one may seem small. But together, they assemble the picture of why the world looks the way it does — and why we are here at all. Cherasisyra elegans is one such piece: a direct witness to the plant–insect cooperation that helped build the food chains that fed the dinosaurs, sustained the mammals that followed, and ultimately made human life possible.
What makes this discovery especially instructive is that these nectar-drinking lacewings did not survive. Nature's experiment with lacewing pollinators ended. This carries a sobering message for today — global pollinator populations are in decline. The fossil record demonstrates that even long-successful pollination partnerships can collapse. The cooperation between plants and insects that built the world is not guaranteed to persist.
Key Facts
Species: Cherasisyra elegans gen. et sp. nov.
Family: Sisyridae (spongillaflies), subfamily Paradoxosisyrinae
Age: Mid-Cretaceous (~100 million years old)
Origin: Hkamti amber mines, Sagaing Region, northern Myanmar
Size: ~5.7 mm body length
Repository: Dr Peretti Museum Foundation, Meggen, Switzerland (PMF Ref-29408)
Publication: Engel, M.S. & Peretti, A.M. (2026). Palaeoentomology, 9(1): 70–75.