Roughly 46 million years ago, a mosquito similar to the ones we have today was searching for a meal. It found one — most likely a bird or small mammal — then flew off, abdomen full of blood. However, things didn’t go well for the insect after that. It ended up submerged in a lake where it drowned and sank to the bottom, eventually becoming fossilized. Fast forward to today and researchers from the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) have uncovered the mosquito in a piece of shale, still engorged with blood.
The fossil insect was discovered in Montana, which was a much wetter place 46 million years ago. Finding a fossilized mosquito is nothing out of the ordinary, though this one is very well-preserved. The fascinating part of this find was the mosquito’s last meal, which was still evident in the fossil abdomen.
Despite what Jurassic Park would have you believe, the odds of finding an ancient mosquito with blood in its belly are incredibly small. In fact, researchers at the NMNH needed to do serious testing to make sure they had correctly interpreted the fossil. Light-refracting x-rays were used to analyze the chemical makeup of the fossil. The insect’s abdomen was found to contain high concentrations of iron, a major component of hemoglobin in the blood.
Anyone hoping to learn more about the genetics of the mosquito’s host will be disappointed, though. Even if the insect had been preserved in amber rather than fossilized, the DNA in the blood would not have survived that long. Scientists have long known that the structure of DNA breaks down in a few million years, even in ideal conditions.