PiConPre - Pigment content and decay conditions: Major drivers for the preservation of insect cuticles

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The 21st century has seen the dawn of a new dimension in palaeobiology given advances in our ability to reconstruct colour and pigment of extinct organisms; analysing fossil colour not only allows us to reconstruct past life and make evolutionary inferences in deep time, but also the ecology of long extinct organisms. Modern insects are the most diverse group of all animals, both in terms of species and their varied and striking colourations. Their fossil record holds great potential to yield colours and pigments to reconstruct how organisms lived, interacted, and evolved, but it has been relatively underused in this context. This is because insects have a very different range of pigmentation strategies from vertebrates, and the fossilisation potential of those pigments has not been (comprehensively) characterised. Furthermore, the diversity and varied biomechanical properties of insect pigments themselves are hypothesised to be intrinsically linked to the fossilisation potential of different tissues resulting in large scale taxonomic biases. This project will explicitly assess the stability and fossilisation potential of insect cuticle and insect pigments through experimental decay in light of biological and physical variables (e.g. decay, degradation, transport). Application of multidisciplinary and innovative techniques, including biological, chemical, biomechanical and engineering approaches (e.g. microbiology, TOFMS and 3-D computational fluid mechanics) will enable us to formulate models for insect and pigment preservation in different geological timescales, palaeoenvironments, and taxonomic levels. Hence, this project will transform our understanding of taphonomy of this important group as it has done for dinosaurs and other vertebrates by elucidating important characteristics of ecological relationships of past communities, and outstanding questions related to evolutionary success of insects