Photo: Jodi Hilton

Flying Fossil

One fine day 310 million years ago, a winged bug lighted upon an outcropping in a steamy flood plain. This October, Tufts geology senior Richard J. Knecht and paleontologist Jacob Benner announced that while combing through the shale and sandstone behind a strip mall in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, they had uncovered an exquisite rendering of that moment, in what may well be the world’s oldest fossil imprint of a flying insect. According to Knecht, the find is “a record of body movement, of action, a snapshot of this insect going about its life. The detail is fantastic. You can see where it wiggled its legs. You can tell exactly how it positioned its body.” The North Attleborough site, which he learned about from an obscure 1929 master’s thesis, has also yielded roughly 1,000 other specimens, including fossilized tracks of amphibians that predate dinosaurs.