Juramordella asperula gen. et sp. nov. (Coleoptera: Tenebrionoidea) is described based on a specimen from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou Biota, Nincheng County, Inner Mongolia of China. Juramordella asperula is distinguished from other Praemordellinae mainly for roughly punctate elytra, absence of subapical or lateral ridges on all tibiae and tarsi, simple, not bilobed protarsi and mesocoxa distant from procoxa, epicoxa not anterior to metacoxa, well‐developed metafemur and absence of elongated pygidium. The morphology of Juramordella asperula demonstrates the early mordellid‐like beetles have adopted the body shape with their way of movement since the Middle Jurassic, long before their flower‐visiting behavior was established.
Reduced tillage practices present a tool that could sustainably intensify agriculture. The existing literature, however, lacks a consensus on how and when reduced tillage practices should get implemented. We reanalyzed here an extensive dataset comparing how regular tillage practices (i.e., conventional tillage) impacted yield of eight crops compared to stopping tillage altogether (i.e., no-tillage practice). We observed that aridity and fertilization favored no tillage over conventional tillage whereas conventional tillage performed better under high fertility settings. We further show that the responses are consistent across the crops. Our reanalysis complements the original and fills a gap in the literature questioning the conditions under which reducing tillage presents a viable alternative to common tillage practices.
Neuropterans seem to be less specious among holometabolans, while they are in fact the relicts of a diverse group from the Mesozoic era. Their early radiation resulted in great family level morphological heterogeneity of extant neuropterans, especially of their larvae. The earliest previously reported fossil larvae of this group were from the Early Cretaceous, where they already showed high taxonomic diversity and an extremely wide range of variations in morphotypes. In this work, the earliest record of the larva of the neuropteran
Palaeoneurorthus baii
gen. et sp. nov. from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou Beds of China is described. The larvae, which have large and elongated bodies, straight stylets with curved apices, an extremely elongated cervix and an extended anterior lobe of pronotum, are placed in Nevrorthidae. The elongated cervix is probably a specialized adaptation for hunting small organisms. The palaeoenvironment of these larvae indicates that larvae of Nevrorthidae have exhibited stable aquatic ecology since the Middle Jurassic, and underwent a possible shift from lakes to more lotic yet constricted modern mountain rivulet habitats over time.
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