Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

<span style=""font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;""> </span><span style=""line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;""> </span>Modern insect faunas are dominated by four hyper-diverse insect orders that grew in diversity alongside the rise of flowering plants, in the Mesozoic or 'Age of Dinosaurs'. These insect groups (beetles, flies, true bugs, plus the order containing ants, wasps, and bees) are major contributors to terrestrial ecosystems, and have significant ecological and economic importance, yet our understanding of their evolutionary relationships and responses to past events is limited by their fossil record. One of the largest gaps in the fossil record of insects stems from a near-absence of data spanning more than ten million years, preceding the end-Cretaceous extinction event and within the subsequent Paleocene epoch. The goal of the proposed research is to fill the so-called Paleocene Gap with well-preserved insect fossils recovered from the numerous fragile ambers of Saskatchewan. The province contains amber deposits in association with many of its coal seams, and amber has also been collected from many of the dinosaur or vertebrate bonebeds that have been excavated within the past decade. Developing amber as a fossil resource will provide insights into the evolutionary relationships and habitat distributions of modern insects. It will also provide a means to assess the impact of Late Cretaceous ecological changes and the end-Cretaceous extinction event on arguably the most important group of terrestrial animals. The outcomes of this work will be of interest to a broad range of scientists, including palaeontologists, evolutionary biologists and geologists, but will also have implications for researchers working on modern insect groups, their relationships, and the application of certain insects as an alternative to pesticides.