Palaeozoic giant dragonfies were hawker predators
dc.contributor.author | Nel, Andre | |
dc.contributor.author | Prokop, Jakub | |
dc.contributor.author | Pecharova, Martina | |
dc.contributor.author | Engel, Michael S. | |
dc.contributor.author | Garrouste, Romain | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2019-11-13T15:05:00Z | |
dc.date.available | 2019-11-13T15:05:00Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2018-08-14 | |
dc.identifier.citation | Nel, A., Prokop, J., Pecharová, M. et al. Palaeozoic giant dragonflies were hawker predators. Sci Rep 8, 12141 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41598-018-30629-w | en_US |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1808/29758 | |
dc.description.abstract | The largest insects to have ever lived were the giant meganeurids of the Late Palaeozoic, ancient stem relatives of our modern dragonfies. With wingspans up to 71cm, these iconic insects have been the subject of varied documentaries on Palaeozoic life, depicting them as patrolling for prey through coal swamp forests amid giant lycopsids, and cordaites. Such reconstructions are speculative as few defnitive details of giant dragonfy biology are known. Most specimens of giant dragonfies are known from wings or isolated elements, but Meganeurites gracilipes preserves critical body structures, most notably those of the head. Here we show that it is unlikely it thrived in densely forested environments where its elongate wings would have become easily damaged. Instead, the species lived in more open habitats and possessed greatly enlarged compound eyes. These were dorsally hypertrophied, a specialization for long-distance vision above the animal in fight, a trait convergent with modern hawker dragonfies. Sturdy mandibles with acute teeth, strong spines on tibiae and tarsi, and a pronounced thoracic skewness are identical to those specializations used by dragonfies in capturing prey while in fight. The Palaeozoic Odonatoptera thus exhibited considerable morphological specializations associated with behaviours attributable to ‘hawkers’ or ‘perchers’ among extant Odonata. | en_US |
dc.description.sponsorship | This work benefted from a grant of the French ‘Agence Nationale de la Recherche’ via the program ‘Investissements d’avenir’ (ANR-11-INBS-0004-RECOLNAT) | en_US |
dc.description.sponsorship | JP and MP gratefully acknowledge research support from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic No. 18-03118 S | en_US |
dc.description.sponsorship | The work of MSE was supported by US National Science Foundation grant DEB-1144162 | en_US |
dc.publisher | Elsevier | en_US |
dc.rights | © The Author(s) 2018Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. | en_US |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | en_US |
dc.subject | Palaeontology | en_US |
dc.subject | Palaeoecology | en_US |
dc.title | Palaeozoic giant dragonfies were hawker predators | en_US |
dc.type | Article | en_US |
kusw.kuauthor | Engel, Michael S. | |
kusw.kudepartment | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | en_US |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1038/s41598-018-30629-w | en_US |
dc.identifier.orcid | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6996-7832 | en_US |
dc.identifier.orcid | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3067-077X | en_US |
kusw.oaversion | Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript | en_US |
kusw.oapolicy | This item meets KU Open Access policy criteria. | en_US |
dc.rights.accessrights | OpenAccess | en_US |
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copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.