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#mantises — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #mantises, aggregated by home.social.

  1. For #FossilFriday meet an ancestor of today's #cockroaches, #mantises and #termites. This lovely #insect is Sysciophlebia, and lived ~295 million years ago, in what is today Germany. It was 3.6cm long, and was a female. How do we know? Well, that structure highlighted in red is the ovipositor, which is used to lay eggs. And while this is quite cockroach-like in appearance, modern cockroaches lay eggs in an egg case, the ootheca.

    #palaeontology #paleontology #fossil #science #entomology