Thursday, October 15, 2026
Science

Solving the mystery behind a flightless beetle's transatlantic journey

They can't fly or swim, so why do their closest relatives appear on different continents? Grey Gustafson, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, discovered through DNA sequencing that the ancestors of some of today's tiger beetles existed in South America and Africa before...

Solving the mystery behind a flightless beetle's transatlantic journey
Image: Phys.org
They can't fly or swim, so why do their closest relatives appear on different continents? Grey Gustafson, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, discovered through DNA sequencing that the ancestors of some of today's tiger beetles existed in South America and Africa before the two continents separated. What's more, North America's largest tiger beetles are related to these ancestral South American giant tiger beetles.

Originally published at Phys.org

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