Plate Nº 30 · recorded November 14, 2026
Biology & EvolutionReported finding
98-Million-Year-Old Amber Traps the First Known Leaf-Mimic Mantis
A mantis trapped in 98-million-year-old amber is the earliest known case of mantises mimicking leaves — copying a plant no modern mantis imitates today.
By James Calloway4 min read714 words
In brief
- A 98-million-year-old mantis in Myanmar amber is the earliest clear fossil evidence of mantises mimicking plant leaves.
- The new species, Folimantis hyalinala, mimics the extinct clubmoss Selaginella grimaldii — no modern mantis mimics Selaginella.
- Leaf-like structures appear only on its abdomen, hinting mantis plant mimicry began at the rear.
- First distinct mantises emerged around 185 million years ago; insect-plant mimicry has evolved over at least 200 million years.
- Myanmar banned fossil exports in 2015; in 2021 the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology urged a publication moratorium on post-January 2021 Myanmar amber.
A 98-million-year-old praying mantis preserved in Myanmar amber is now the earliest clear fossil evidence of mantises mimicking plant leaves — and its disguise, worn entirely on its abdomen, has no living parallel.
Paleoentomologist Hongru Yang and colleagues named the insect Folimantis hyalinala in the journal New Phytologist. The genus name means 'leaf mantis'; the species name refers to the glass-like transparency of its wings, through which the leaf-like abdominal extensions are visible in the specimen.
What did the mantis actually look like?
The insect's abdomen bears an uncanny resemblance to the extinct clubmoss Selaginella grimaldii, which is also known from amber specimens found in the same region. The scale bar in the researchers' comparison images is 0.5 millimeters. That's small. But the match, the authors argue, is real.
Insect-plant mimicry has evolved over at least 200 million years, yet reliable fossil examples remain scarce. "The mimicry style of F. hyalinala with Selaginella has never been reported before, and there are no species that mimic Selaginella among modern Mantodea," Yang and colleagues write.
That last point deserves a pause. No modern mantis copies this plant. So this was an evolutionary experiment that, at least among mantises, eventually ended.
How does a mantis grow leaves?
Modern mantises offer a familiar template. The orchid mantis, Hymenopus coronatus, a Southeast Asian species, looks like a flower down to its pink and cream petal-like body — and it sways like a flower in the wind.
When F. hyalinala lived, in the mid-Cretaceous, flowering plants had not yet taken over. So evolution worked with what was available: leaves. Each mantis that looked a little more like its host plant had a better chance of sneaking up on prey while staying hidden from its own predators. The plants benefited too, gaining protection from herbivorous insects by their mantid tenants.
Standard evolutionary logic: better disguise, better survival, more offspring. Repeat over millions of generations. The end result was that uncanny Selaginella resemblance.
Here's the strange part. Many modern plant-mimicking mantises wear foliar features across multiple body parts. F. hyalinala has them on its abdomen only. The authors suggest this could mean plant mimicry in mantises began at the rear, with modifications to the wings and thorax emerging later. Could. It's one specimen, and they say so implicitly by framing it as a hint rather than a conclusion.
How old is the mantis family, anyway?
Praying mantises share an ancestor with cockroaches, which lived around 274 million years ago. Recent taxonomic research suggests the first distinct mantises emerged around 185 million years ago, during the Jurassic, while the supercontinent Gondwana was breaking apart.
That long, fragmented history could help explain why mantises are so widespread, so diverse, and so tightly adapted to specific environments. They've had a lot of time to hone their disguises. And they weren't alone: some cockroaches (Blattodea), grasshoppers (Orthoptera), stick insects (Phasmatodea) and other insects were evolving plant-like features around the same window of the fossil record. Something in the shared insect body plan, the researchers note, seems to have enabled this feature to emerge repeatedly alongside the evolution of plants.
What does this change for paleontology?
Practically, it pushes back the earliest evidence of plant mimicry in mantises to at least 98 million years — a hard data point where before there was inference. It doesn't rewrite mantis evolution. It anchors it.
There's also an ethical footnote that can't be skipped. Kachin amber mining and trade is linked to ongoing sociopolitical turmoil in Myanmar, with concerns the trade helps fund what the United Nations condemns as a "genocidal crime against humanity." Myanmar banned fossil exports in 2015, but amber-embedded specimens fall into a legal grey area. In 2021, after the military coup, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology called for a "hard moratorium on the publication of all fossil specimens in amber obtained from sources in Myanmar after January 2021."
The F. hyalinala specimen sidesteps that cutoff, at least on paper: collector Fangyuan Xia acquired it in 2015 and donated it that same year to the insect evolution lab at Capital Normal University in Beijing. The science is striking. The supply chain behind it remains the field's open wound.
via sciencealert.com (Source)
More from James Calloway
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Staff writer covering regulation, policy and their impact on general science news at SciBeat.
377 articles
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