An ancient, colorful, robot-like creature has surprised scientists by “appearing” intact in an extremely rare Cretaceous amber in Hungary.

The creature with the scientific name Alienopterix santonicus is… a cockroach, but a “monster” cockroach that lives with dinosaurs.

The scientists’ graphic image depicts a brightly colored creature, but research just published in the scientific journal Biologia says it’s also a creature… glittering iridescent, looks like A robot lost in the world of ancient monsters.

The colorful and metallic “monster” cockroach of the Cretaceous period – Photo: Márton Zsoldos

The rare piece of amber that holds it was unearthed in a tunnel of the Ajka-Csingervolgy coal mine in Hungary, famous for containing arthropod inclusions.

Dating results show that the piece of amber and certainly the whole body of the strange cockroach inside are about 83-86 million years old, which is the late Cretaceous period.

It belongs to the family Alienopteridae, an extinct family of cockroaches previously known only from North America and Northern Myanmar and the only known family in the superfamily Umenocoleoidea.

And it’s also the only family to have survived the subsequent late Cretaceous mass extinction, triggered by the Chicxulub dinosaur-killing meteorite.

The piece of amber preserves the organism’s body – Photo: Biologia

Paleontologist Márton Szabó from the Hungarian Museum of Natural History and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, lead author of the study, said: “Cockroaches are one of the most dominant insect orders in ecosystems. Paleozoic and Mesozoic”.

“Appearing in the Late Carboniferous, they are thought to be the ancestors of termites, mantises, and Chresmoda (an extinct genus of insects.) During their 320-million-year-long evolution, cockroaches have adapted to many ecosystems and develop a high degree of ecological, behavioral and morphological diversity,” said Dr Szabó .

Source: nld.com.vn