The oldest Australian mayfly (Insecta, Ephemerida) from the Middle Triassic at Brookvale, New South Wales

Abstract

The fossil record of mayflies in Australia has been restricted to two localities, the oldest being of Cretaceous age. Here, we describe a new fossil mayfly nymph, Warungata peterjelli gen. et sp. nov., from the Middle Triassic (Anisian) Hawkesbury Sandstone at the Beacon Hill quarry in Brookvale, Sydney, Australia. This finding shifts the age of documented mayfly occurrences in Australia back to the early Mesozoic. Warungata peterjelli is attributed to Ephemerida based mainly on the presence of wing pads with visible developing ephemeroid venation. Although the preservation of W. peterjelli does not allow a precise phylogenetic placement of the taxon, it does exhibit some affinity with stem-group mayflies based on its well-developed metathorax, which resembles Palaeozoic lineages with homonomous wing pairs. https://zoobank.org/3C5EF6DE-9424-47EE-8D2A-B8E591A225EA

Pavel Sroka [[email protected]], Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Entomology, Branišovská 31, České Budějovice, 370 05, Czech Republic; Jakub Prokop [[email protected]], Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, Praha 2, 128 00, Czech Republic.

Keywords:

• Aquatic insects
• Ephemeroptera
• fossil
• Mesozoic
• nymph

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Matthew McCurry and Patrick Smith (AM) for access to the collection and loan of material for study. Jiří Týč assisted with SEM, and Chris Steer proofread our manuscript. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a project of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic [No. 24-11498S] and institutional support of the Institute of Entomology (Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences) RVO: 60077344 for PS.