40 million years before butterflies existed, this creature evolved with strikingly similar looks

Before butterflies, there were Kalligrammatid lacewings — winged insects that took butterfly-like form at least 40 million years before the modern bugs first came on the scene. But the remarkably butterflyesque species Oregramma illecebrosa, described in a study published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, isn’t a butterfly ancestor: Other members of its lineage went on to become entirely different sorts of insects. Instead, this striking similarity is a case of convergent evolution — the same shapes, patterns and perhaps even behaviors came about twice, totally independently.

The findings come thanks to some especially well-preserved fossils found in northeastern China, which allowed researchers to study the ancient insects more closely than ever before.

“They’ve been known for about 100 years, but in the 1960s there were some specimens that made people say, gosh, these really look like butterflies,” Smithsonian paleoecologist Conrad Labandeira, lead author on the study, told The Washington Post. “But we knew they were unrelated. That’s where it stood for some 55 years.”

But once Labandeira and his team — an international collaboration of scientists — got a hold of the Chinese fossils, things got much more interesting. The resemblance is so strong that even experts were fooled at a distance: Labandeira recalls a colleague from the entomology department assuming the fossil on the table was a butterfly from 20 feet away.

“When I told him to come closer, and he looked again, his jaw dropped,” Labandeira said.

One of the more remarkable similarities is superficial in nature: The spots seen on the Oregramma illecebrosa fossils are nearly identical to patterns found on owl butterflies today. These so-called eye spots mimic the peepers of a large bird, scaring off predators that might otherwise make a quick snack of a delicate butterfly.

It’s thought that Oregramma illecebrosa last shared a common ancestor with modern butterflies more than 320 million years ago. The fact that two quite unrelated insects developed these markings millions of years apart from one another is a perfect example of convergent evolution: Oregramma illecebrosa might not have shared space with owls, but plenty of big-eyed creatures — perhaps even dinosaurs, the prominent predators of the Jurassic period — scould have served as inspiration for the markings. An Oregramma illecebrosa would have had a better chance of surviving dino dinnertime if it could pass itself off as a bigger animal, and over time — as faux-eyed insects continued to breed more successfully than those without the markings — the patterns would become more complex.

Then, millions of years later, an unrelated group of insects did the exact same thing.

This story was originally published February 8, 2016 at 5:25 AM with the headline "40 million years before butterflies existed, this creature evolved with strikingly similar looks."