The defining feature of Noo-Noo is its mouthparts. These structures were exceptionally long and flexible, reaching nearly twice the length of the insect’s body. Among modern planthoppers, the closest living relatives of the newly described species, mouthparts are built like a simple needle: rigid, straight, and suited to piercing plant tissue to draw out fluids. Noo-Noo and its ancient kin, by contrast, carried feeding organs that could bend and extend, allowing them to reach food sources inaccessible to insects with more conventional equipment — deep inside cracks and crevices in tree bark, where sugar-rich fluids could be tapped.

The study was led by Dolev Fabrikant and Dr. Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou of Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology, part of the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History and the New Environmental School. The team examined fossil insects belonging to Neazoniidae, an ancient family of planthoppers, including 13 specimens preserved in Kachin amber from Myanmar. Kachin amber is one of the most important windows into Cretaceous terrestrial life, preserving organisms in extraordinary three-dimensional detail, and the Neazoniidae specimens it contains turned out to hold a surprise that only modern imaging technology could fully unpack.

Under close examination, the elongated mouthparts of the ancient insects revealed a surface densely covered with transverse folds. To determine whether these folds were merely decorative or structurally meaningful, the researchers turned to high-resolution micro-computed tomography, a technique that uses X-rays to reconstruct internal anatomy without damaging the fossil. The scans showed that the folds were integral to the structure itself rather than external ornamentation. Their likely function was to give the mouthparts flexibility while preventing them from kinking or collapsing under stress — much like a bendy drinking straw or a corrugated flexible hose, which can curve freely without pinching shut.

The fossils themselves provided further confirmation of this flexibility. In several specimens, the mouthparts were preserved in a bent position. Because amber freezes insects in place at the moment they are engulfed by resin, these bent postures represent snapshots of the animals as they were in life. The researchers therefore interpret the curled mouthparts as direct evidence that the structures were genuinely flexible while the insects were alive, not artifacts of preservation. Among the living relatives of Neazoniidae, no comparable structure is known, marking this as an ancient evolutionary solution that has since disappeared entirely.

The new species’ unusual appearance inspired its name. The epithet “Noo-Noo” was chosen after the friendly vacuum cleaner from the children’s television series Teletubbies, whose long, flexible hose bears an uncanny resemblance to the ancient insect’s feeding organ. The whimsical moniker belies the scientific weight of the find, but it also captures the essence of the discovery: an animal whose most distinctive feature looks like something engineered rather than evolved, a corrugated tube coiled within a creature smaller than a fingernail.

Why would an insect need such an elaborate feeding apparatus? Butterflies might seem an obvious comparison, since they use a flexible proboscis to drink nectar from flowers. The researchers, however, believe the resemblance is only superficial. The mouthparts of Noo-Noo pointed backward and functioned as a piercing-and-sucking system, a design that, like those of its modern relatives, is poorly suited to nectar feeding. Moreover, despite examining numerous fossils, the team found no convincing evidence of pollen accumulating on the insects’ bodies — the kind of sign that would indicate a role as pollinators. The butterfly analogy, in other words, fails on both anatomical and ecological grounds.

The explanation the researchers propose is more specialized: these insects were sap-suckers with a taste for what lies beneath the bark. Their long, flexible mouthparts could have snaked through narrow cracks in tree bark and guided the piercing organs toward deep vascular tissues, where nutrient-rich fluids flow. At the tip of the mouthpart sat another unusual feature — a structure with two grooved lobes that likely opened during feeding, helping to anchor the mouthpart against the walls of the crack. The researchers liken this mechanism to a wall plug expanding inside a drilled hole, holding the apparatus firmly in place while the insect fed.

The discovery may carry broader implications for understanding Cretaceous forest ecosystems. Long or corrugated feeding structures appeared in several unrelated insect groups during this period, raising the possibility that forests rich in thick-barked trees offered a competitive advantage to insects capable of reaching deeper tissues. The study notes that resin-producing forests of the Cretaceous were also associated with evidence of recurrent fires, and trees in fire-prone environments often develop thicker bark as protection. The researchers cautiously suggest that such conditions may have created ecological opportunities for unique feeding strategies — strategies that are almost entirely absent among planthoppers today, whose needle-like mouthparts reflect a very different set of environmental pressures.

Dr. Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou stated: “The discovery of ‘Noo-Noo,’ a new species that lived approximately 99 million years ago, gives us an extraordinary glimpse into the insect world of the age of the dinosaurs. This is not merely an insect previously unknown to science, but an animal that developed an evolutionary solution with almost no modern equivalent: a long, flexible, and durable feeding organ that likely enabled it to reach food deep within tree bark. The fact that similar structures appeared in several insect groups during the Cretaceous period suggests that ancient forests created ecological conditions and opportunities very different from those we know today. The discovery of a new species like this is therefore not simply the addition of another name to the tree of life, but another piece of the puzzle that enables us to reconstruct what ecosystems looked like and how they functioned tens of millions of years ago.”

For paleontologists, the find underscores the value of amber as a time capsule. Soft structures such as flexible mouthparts rarely survive in conventional compression fossils, where delicate anatomy is crushed or dissolved over geological time. Amber, by contrast, entombs specimens in three dimensions, preserving fine surface detail and even internal architecture that can be visualized with micro-CT scanning. Without such preservation, a feeding apparatus as unusual as Noo-Noo’s might never have been recognized, and the evolutionary experiment it represents would have vanished from the record altogether.

The description of Cretodorus noonoo adds a new branch to the tree of life and, just as importantly, a new data point in the history of ecological specialization. It shows that during the age of the dinosaurs, insects were experimenting with feeding strategies that have since been abandoned, shaped by forests whose structure and fire regimes differed markedly from those of the modern world. Each such discovery refines the picture of how Cretaceous ecosystems functioned — and reminds us that evolution’s portfolio has always included designs that today seem almost alien.

Subject of Research: A new Cretaceous planthopper species with flexible, corrugated mouthparts preserved in Kachin amber

Article Title: Rare discovery reveals a new species from the dinosaur age

Article References: Rare discovery reveals a new species from the dinosaur age. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Cretodorus noonoo, amber fossil, planthoppers, Neazoniidae, Kachin amber, Cretaceous period, micro-computed tomography, insect mouthparts, Tel Aviv University, paleontology, tree bark feeding, Myanmar amber