Beetles Ate The Fossils

By Ryan Kresse, Wisconsin

It’s 150 million years ago. You’re a dinosaur in the throes of death. Lunch for something fast and hungry - something that hunts in packs, like in the movies. You have a moment left to contemplate your wild, Jurassic life.

As your life slips away, as those raptors peck at your flesh (won’t they be surprised when they evolve into chickens), you dream the final dream of every dying dinosaur: that someday, millions of years in the future, someone will find you. If they find enough of you, perhaps you'll end up in a museum. Legions of nerdy children will know your Latin name. Artists will render you. You’ll be in films, on postcards, and on T-shirts. You’ll be immortal. Maybe.

First you're going to have to avoid having your rotting flesh being eaten by beetles. Paleontologist Brooks Britt and his team from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, have examined thousands of dinosaur bones and found that flesh-eating bugs have partially erased the fossil record. Britt and his team looked at over 5,000 samples and found that a lot of them had been gnawed on. “About one-eighth of the specimens have been degraded by insects. They’re surprisingly common,” said Britt.

According to Britt, some of the bugs that ate dead dinosaurs were beetles called Dermestids, ancestors of modern Dermestes maculatus, which lay their eggs in carrion and can strip a carcass clean. Today, the beetles are used as forensic evidence to determine the age of a corpse. They are even used by museums as a natural way of cleaning the flesh off animal skeletons.

Dermestes maculatus, otherwise known as the
leather beetle

A study of fossil evidence by Stephen Hasiotis, a doctoral researcher from the University of Colorado at Boulder, revealed similar results. Using a scanning electron microscope, Hasiotis and his team found distinct marks from beetle mandibles, indicating that dermestid beetles had eaten bits of about twelve percent of the tested samples.

And while it’s no real surprise that prehistoric bugs ate stuff, the findings do create a more complex picture of life 150 million years ago.

“Without microbes and insects, the ecological system would have stalled. Ancient insects were the engines driving and maintaining ecosystem health”, said Hasiotis.

You, the dinosaur, just lie there. The beetles have found you. They bore into your flesh and bones. They lay their eggs in you. Their larvae use you for food. And unless you quickly get covered in a mudslide or buried by sediment, providing the oxygen-starved environment you need to become a fossil, your dreams of posthumous fame are over. Eaten, in the end (and in the end), by beetles.

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