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Years ago, I gave a conference paper in San Diego with one eye completely closed by a mosquito bite. Mosquitoes command attention, like other biting arthropods, because of the discomfort they cause and their role as disease vectors. Mosquitoes also played a critical role in the most famous dinosaur movie of modern times: the last meal of these blood suckers was the source of the dinosaur DNA that populated the fictional Jurassic Park 20 y ago. Therefore, the PNAS report of a 46-My-old mosquito with blood in its abdomen (1) is arresting, but its significance lies in emphasizing the importance of unusual preservations. We need to understand the taphonomy (the process of fossilization) of such fossil deposits to interpret the information they provide (Fig. 1) (2). (A) Large insects succumb to decay and predation while tiny ones sink and are buried in the seasonal varves. (Prepared by J. Hall.) (B) The mosquito is flattened in the oil shale while the protein component of the blood hemoglobin decays, leaving the heme which is modified slightly during fossilization. (Live mosquito image from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; hemoglobin image courtesy of Richard Wheeler, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.) The chances of postprandial preservation of a delicate insect like a mosquito are vanishingly small. There are >3,500 living species of mosquito (Family Culicidae) (3). A recent molecular phylogeny calibrated by rare fossil occurrences indicates that mosquitoes radiated in the early Cretaceous, but probably first appeared much earlier (4). Nonetheless, just 25 fossil species are recognized. The oldest example is from mid-Cretaceous (93.9–100.5 Mya) amber from Burma; granular material in its gut may represent a blood meal, …

A mosquito’s last supper reminds us not to underestimate the fossil record