If you think your sex life is in a rut, consider these froghoppers: they have been stuck in the missionary position for 165 million years.
This is the oldest known fossil of two insects mating, and should help theories of how insects evolved their wide array of sexual proclivities.
It was found by Chungkun Shih, of the Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, who has spent the last 10 years looking through hundreds of thousands of fossils, on the hunt for two insects caught mid-copulation. "I have seen more than half a million and this is the only one showing mating," he says. Finding fossils of animals displaying behaviour is rare, and mating particularly so.
Doing it, at first
Judging from the plethora of sexual positions in modern-day insects – from side-by-side to a-hook-in-the-eyeball
Despite this, most modern species do it doggy-style or male-on-top. A popular theory on the evolution of sexual behaviour in insects holds that it started with females on top, says Herberstein .
The theory states that as positions evolved from female-on-top to male-on-top, they migrated through the belly-to-belly (missionary) position. A relic of this is seen in some insects today: modern froghoppers, for instance, will still adopt it if conditions are right*. But a lack of fossils means the theory is still just speculation, says Herberstein. "It does require fossils like this excellent one to confirm," she says.
Does this tell us anything about other creatures? "Think about this," says Herberstein, "There are more species of insects than anything else on this planet. So by understanding insect sexual behaviour we understand the behaviour of most animals."
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078188
*The sexual position of modern froghoppers depends on the surface they are on. On a leaf, for instance, they mate side-by-side. But if they find themselves on a stem, they will mate belly-to-belly.
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