I saw an article on a mantis encased in Amber that’s 30 million years old. assuming mantis reproduce once a year, this thing is like 30 million generations removed from a modern mantis. It might not even be able to reproduce with a modern mantis Even if it does look exactly the same.
I looked into humans as a comparison and even 10 million years ago, the modern human didn’t even exist. there’s a good chance we’re too separated from them to reproduce or even be considered the same species. so wouldn’t that also apply to this 30 million year old mantis.
In: Biology
Sharks are older than trees. Before TREES evolved there were pretty-much-the-same-as-a-modern-shark swimming around.
They would not be the SAME SPECIES but could be from the same genera or other higher level organization.
So the mantis in amber likely doesn’t have any living relatives it could breed with, but it would have various descendants and descendants of it’s contemporary cousins.
Humans evolved rapidly in the last million years or so. Many other organisms looked pretty much the exact same for the last several hundred million years
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