Researchers from the University of Łódź, MSc Alicja Pełczyńska and Associate Professor Agnieszka Soszyńska, in collaboration with an international team of scientists from Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and Denmark, used synchrotron imaging to unravel the mystery of the extinct fly genus Kelneria, one of the most abundant inhabitants of the European amber forests approximately 40 million years ago. The findings were published in the journal Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny.
Today, this genus is completely extinct, but its disappearance is only part of the mystery. Kelneria possessed a highly unusual anatomy. Most remarkable were the male genitalia, which are uniquely reduced, measuring only fractions of a millimetre, with their individual components so tightly packed that they overlap one another. As a result, conventional light microscopy could not resolve their detailed structure.
A breakthrough came, among other techniques, with synchrotron radiation X-ray micro-computed tomography (SRµCT), performed at the POLYX beamline of the SOLARIS National Synchrotron Radiation Centre. Micrometre-resolution images enabled researchers to produce three-dimensional reconstructions and perform a virtual dissection of the fossil flies. For the first time, it became possible to reconstruct the anatomy of this extinct group in detail and compare it with that of its living relatives.
Read more on the SOLARIS website
Image: Kelneria specimen preserved in amber (left) and its three-dimensional reconstruction based on synchrotron radiation X-ray micro-computed tomography (SRµCT; right). The enlargement shows the highly reduced male genitalia, whose morphology was reconstructed in detail for the first time using synchrotron imaging.