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

随着我们重建已灭绝生物的颜色和色素的能力的进步，21世纪见证了古生物学的一个新维度的曙光；分析化石颜色不仅使我们能够重建过去的生命并在更深的时间内做出进化推断，而且还使我们能够研究早已灭绝的生物的生态。现代昆虫是所有动物中最多样化的一类，无论是在物种方面，还是在它们多变而引人注目的颜色方面。它们的化石记录具有巨大的潜力，可以产生颜色和色素来重建生物体如何生活、相互作用和进化，但在这方面一直没有得到充分的利用。这是因为昆虫的色素策略与脊椎动物非常不同，而这些色素的化石潜力还没有(全面)表征。此外，昆虫色素本身的多样性和不同的生物力学特性被假设与不同组织的化石潜力内在地联系在一起，从而导致大规模的分类偏差。这个项目将根据生物和物理变量(例如腐烂、降解、运输)，通过实验腐烂来明确评估昆虫角质层和昆虫色素的稳定性和化石潜力。多学科和创新技术的应用，包括生物、化学、生物力学和工程方法(如微生物学、TOFMS和三维计算流体力学)将使我们能够在不同的地质时间尺度、古环境和分类水平下建立昆虫和色素保存的模型。因此，这个项目将通过阐明过去群落生态关系的重要特征，以及与昆虫进化成功相关的突出问题，改变我们对这一重要群体的攻丝学的理解，就像它对恐龙和其他脊椎动物所做的那样。

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