College of Life Sciences and Academy for Multidisciplinary Studies, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China.
Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, United States.
Elife. 2020 Jul 29;9:e59007. doi: 10.7554/eLife.59007.
Animals mimicking other organisms or using camouflage to deceive predators are vital survival strategies. Modern and fossil insects can simulate diverse objects. Lichens are an ancient symbiosis between a fungus and an alga or a cyanobacterium that sometimes have a plant-like appearance and occasionally are mimicked by modern animals. Nevertheless, lichen models are almost absent in fossil record of mimicry. Here, we provide the earliest fossil evidence of a mimetic relationship between the moth lacewing mimic gen. nov. and its co-occurring fossil lichen model . We corroborate the lichen affinity of and document this mimetic relationship by providing structural similarities and detailed measurements of the mimic's wing and correspondingly the model's thallus. Our discovery of lichen mimesis predates modern lichen-insect associations by 165 million years, indicating that during the mid-Mesozoic, the lichen-insect mimesis system was well established and provided lacewings with highly honed survival strategies.
动物模仿其他生物或使用伪装来欺骗捕食者是至关重要的生存策略。现代和化石昆虫可以模拟各种物体。地衣是一种古老的真菌和藻类或蓝细菌之间的共生关系，有时具有植物状的外观，偶尔会被现代动物模仿。然而，地衣模型在模仿的化石记录中几乎不存在。在这里，我们提供了蛾类草蛉拟态属的最早的化石证据。
我们证实了 的地衣亲缘关系，并通过提供拟态翅膀和相应模型叶状体的结构相似性和详细测量来记录这种拟态关系。我们发现的地衣拟态比现代地衣-昆虫共生关系早 1.65 亿年，这表明在中生代中期，地衣-昆虫拟态系统已经很好地建立起来，并为草蛉提供了高度完善的生存策略。
