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    "headline": "98-million-year-old mantis in amber had leaf-like lobes on its abdomen; it mimicked an ancient spikemoss",
    "description": "Folimantis hyalinala, a 98-million-year-old mantis in Kachin amber, grew leaf-shaped abdominal lobes that mimicked the leaves of a Cretaceous spikemoss.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-14T22:30:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "Science",
    "keywords": "Capital Normal University, Folimantis hyalinala, Kachin amber, Praying mantis, Selaginella",
    "articleBody": "A praying mantis trapped in tree resin 98 million years ago carried a row of leaf-shaped flaps on its abdomen, and those flaps match the tiny leaves of a spikemoss that grew in the same Cretaceous forest. Researchers have named the insect Folimantis hyalinala, a new genus and species, and they say it is the earliest direct evidence of a mantis disguising itself as a specific plant. The fossil sits in Kachin amber from northern Myanmar. The description, by Hongru Yang, Liang Chen, Dong Ren and Taiping Gao of Capital Normal University in Beijing with Michael S. Engel of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, appears in the journal New Phytologist (doi 10.1111/nph.71619), first online on October 4, 2026. A mantis dressed as a spikemoss Plenty of living mantises hide in plain sight: some look like orchids, others like dead leaves or twigs. Most of that camouflage is carried on the wings, legs or body outline. Folimantis did something rarer, according to the team’s abstract. It grew flat, leaf-shaped extensions from its abdomen. The researchers compared those lobes with the vegetative leaves, called trophophylls, of Selaginella, the spikemosses. They report a match in three ways at once: shape, size and the pattern in which the “leaves” are arranged along the body. That combination is what lets them argue for mimicry of one plant group, rather than a general leafy look. Spikemosses are low, creeping plants with small scale-like leaves on branching stems. They are not true mosses but lycophytes, an ancient line of vascular plants. Fossils of the genus run back more than 300 million years, and more than 750 species still grow today, mostly in the tropics. A mantis sitting still on a spikemoss mat with a row of matching flaps would have been hard for a hungry lizard or bird to pick out. Why a 98-million-year-old disguise matters Insects and plants have been shaping each other for hundreds of millions of years, but evidence of mimicry from deep time is thin, because soft details rarely fossilize. Amber is the exception: it holds fine structures in three dimensions. The team says Folimantis shows that early mantises, from the so-called stem group that came before modern families, had already evolved body parts copying plant leaves during the early branching of the order Mantodea. The authors also ran a broader analysis of fossil insect-plant mimicry across the Late Paleozoic and Mesozoic. Before flowering plants took over in the Late Cretaceous, insects were already copying gymnosperms, ferns, lichens and spikemosses. As the dominant plants changed through time, the forms of mimicry changed with them. Limits of the find This is one fossil, and the study’s evidence is a comparison of shapes; behavior does not fossilize, so the claim that the insect actually sat among spikemosses is an inference. The full paper sits behind a subscription, and our account relies on the published abstract and its indexed record. It is the second mantis story on our pages this week. For a living pair, read how James Cook University’s Matthew Connors named two new praying mantis species, one first spotted on a citizen science app. More fossils and field discoveries are collected in our Science section. Further reading New Phytologist paper (DOI) Wikipedia: Selaginella Image: Dan MacNeal, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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