An insect has been found that went extinct for over 120 million years and featured several traits related to today’s butterflies, including wing markings called eye spots.

Called Kalligrammatid lacewings, paleobotanists since last 100 years were aware that they lived in Eurasia at the time of the Mesozoic.

However, now it has come to their knowledge that how similar they were to present day butterflies, thanks to recent discoveries of well-preserved fossils from two places in northeastern China that showed so.

Due to extensive lakes that restricted oxygen exposure in such regions during mid-Jurassic through early Cretaceous time, paleontologists have got to recover exquisitely preserved fossils, retaining much of their actual structure.

Indiana University’s David Dilcher, who belonged to the team that made the discovery, carried by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, said in a statement that poor preservation of lacewing fossils had always hindered trails of carrying out kalligrammatid’s detailed morphological and ecological examination.

Dilcher added, “Upon examining these new fossils, however, we've unraveled a surprisingly wide array of physical and ecological similarities between the fossil species and modern butterflies, which shared a common ancestor 320 million years ago”.

Last year, Dilcher found the first flower, and now he has discovered that this insect belonging to the Jurassic period survived in a manner akin their present day sister insects by approaching plants having ‘flower-like’ reproductive organs that produce nectar and pollen.

It might be the case that they used their long tongues to search nectar deep inside the plant. They had hairy legs with the help of which they carried pollen from a plant’s male flower-like reproductive organs to another plant’s flower-like female reproductive organs.

With time, this system of pollination known as gymnosperms resulted into a more familiar system of insect pollinators and present day flowers, or angiosperms, where in the plants’ reproductive parts were contained with a protective seed.