14 DAY TRIAL // There are more described beetle species than all the other described animal species. And it is believed that there are even more undescribed species, by the order of millions, to be included into the beetles' Coleoptera Order, with 17 "superfamilies" and 168 families. Many will disappear before description, as we destroy their environments.
But, a new research published in the journal "Science" explains this tremendous diversity amongst beetles: their age. It was believed that they started to rapidly evolve 140 million years ago, connected to the evolutionary boom of the flowering plants. But, the new research combining DNA analysis and fossils shows they could have emerged 300 million years ago, 60 million years before the most primitive dinosaurs walked the Earth.
"Unlike the dinosaurs which dwindled to extinction, beetles survived because of their ecological diversity and adaptability", said lead researcher Alfried Vogler, an entomologist at Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum in London. "Beetles' head start on our planet with its ever-changing environments was the secret to their success. The large number of beetle species existing today could very well be a direct result of this early evolution and the fact that there has been a very high rate of survival and continuous diversification of many lineages since then", said Vogler.
Vogler's team achieved its results by analyzing the DNA of 1,880 modern beetle species (from 80 % of the existing families), and also compared 265 million-year-old fossils to create detailed evolutionary trees and to find out when different branches appeared. The new genetic analyses point that, by then, beetles had already been evolving for a long time.
"Filling the gaps was often tough because it required the study of species that are rare or restricted to remote parts of the world", Vogler notes.
The earliest branches in the Polyphaga, the largest beetle group, comprising all major plant-feeding groups, went back to the Paleozoic era (270 million years ago). When the first modern flowering plants emerged about 140 million years ago, over 100 modern groups of beetles were already numerous.
"With beetles forming such a large proportion of all known species, learning about their relationships and evolution gives us important new insights into the origin of biodiversity and how beetles have triumphed over the course of nearly 300 million years", he added.