14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific investigation, it would appear that cockroaches of the genus Ectobius, which now occupies impressively-large swaths of Europe and Africa, did not originate on the Old Continent, as previously speculated.
Researchers in the United States recently discovered no less than four ancient species of Ectobius, all of them at the Green River Formation, near Rifle, Colorado. This geological formation is estimated to be around 49 million years old. The oldest Ectobius sample collected from Europe is 44 million years old.
What this discovery implies is that these cockroaches roamed North America around 5 million years before they reached what is now Europe. So long ago, the continents were still united in a single mass, so all species found it very easy to travel from one location to the other, EurekAlert reports.
Details of the new species of cockroach were published in this month's issue of the scientific journal Annals of the Entomological Society of America. One of the new species is named Ectobius kohlsi, after fossil insect collector David Kohls, who has gathered more than 150,000 samples of ancient insects to date.