Tiny beetle trapped in 53-million-year-old amber is named after Twenty One Pilots

Preserved in amber for about 53 million years, a beetle has been described as a new species by researchers in Spain and France. Named Cnopus twentyonepilotorum, it is the first puppet beetle (family Aderidae) to be formally described from the Oise amber of northern France. The findings are published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The study was led by Jules Ferreira, a PhD candidate at the Institut Botànic de Barcelona (CSIC-CMCNB) and the Facultat de Ciències de la Terra of the Universitat de Barcelona, with Erich L. Spiessberger and David Peris. They worked with André Nel of the Institut de Systématique, Évolution, Biodiversité (ISYEB) at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, a joint unit of the CNRS, Sorbonne Université, EPHE and Université des Antilles, and with Alessandra Patera of the ALBA Synchrotron.

Puppet beetles, also known as ant-like leaf beetles, are small insects with about 1,000 living species found on every continent except Antarctica. Despite this reach, their biology is poorly known and their fossil record is sparse. The Oise amber, from Le Quesnoy near Creil, is one of the oldest Cenozoic ambers in Europe and preserves the fauna of a warm, humid forest from the early Eocene.

“Aderidae had already been reported from this amber, but none had ever been formally described,” said Ferreira. “Our specimen offered the opportunity to fill this gap and to better understand the evolutionary history of the family.”

To study the fossil without damaging the amber, the team used synchrotron X-ray microtomography at the ALBA Synchrotron, which allowed them to reconstruct a detailed 3D model of the fossil beetle and compare it with living species. The beetle belongs to Cnopus, a genus that still exists today. Until now, its oldest fossils of this genus came from the Baltic and Bitterfeld ambers, around 38 to 34-million-years-old. This discovery shows that this beetle lineage was already established in Western European forests in the early Eocene, roughly 15 million years earlier than previously documented. Some internal structures normally used to distinguish living species were not preserved, so the fossil cannot be fully compared with all its modern relatives. Its age, however, makes it very unlikely to belong to a species still alive today.

“What surprised us most was how little the external morphology of this lineage has changed over time,” said Ferreira. “Despite more than 50 million years of evolution, major climatic changes and the transformation of European forests, the overall external morphology of these tiny beetles has remained remarkably stable.”

The species name honours the band Twenty One Pilots. The authors say the dedication acknowledges the group’s contribution to raising awareness of mental health and to reducing the stigma around anxiety, depression and personal hardship.

The team is now studying other puppet beetles from the Oise amber and hopes to learn which beetle groups persisted in European forests between the early and late Eocene.

“Amber is exceptional in this respect,” said Ferreira. “It sometimes preserves several organisms trapped together, offering rare snapshots of ancient ecological associations. Each new fossil adds a piece to this puzzle and helps us better understand how beetle communities were assembled and how they changed through time.”

The holotype is held in the palaeontological collection of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris.