A professor of entomology has described his amazement after discovering that a bug he discovered at a branch of Walmart in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a decade ago turns out to be a “super-rare” Jurassic-era insect.
Dr Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State University’s Insect Identification Lab, picked up the specimen after it caught his eye outside of the store in 2012. But he did not realise its importance until he discussed it during a Zoom class with students eight years later at the height of the pandemic, whereupon he realised he had mis-identified it.
