Scientists have found an insect that went extinct for over 120 million years. The insect has many of the traits linked to modern butterflies like markings on the wing known as eye spots.

They are called Kalligrammatid lacewings, and for the last 100 years paleobotanists were aware that they lived in Eurasia during the Mesozoic.

However, now after analyzing the recent discoveries of well-preserved fossils from two locations in northeastern China, paleobotanists have got to know about how alike they were to modern butterflies.

It is because of the extensive lakes that restricted oxygen exposure in these sites during mid-Jurassic through early Cretaceous time that paleontologists have got to recover exquisitely preserved fossils, preserving most of their real structure.

In a statement, Indiana University’s David Dilcher said that the attempts to carry out a detailed morphological and ecological examination of the kalligrammatid have always suffered because of poor preservation of lacewing fossils. Dilcher belongs to the team that made the discovery appeared in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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”.

Dilcher has discovered this insect from the Jurassic period lived in a manner quite like their their modern sister insects by approaching to plants having ‘flower-like’ reproductive organs that produce nectar and pollen.

It may be the case that they used their long tongues to investigate nectar deep inside the plant and also had hairy legs that permitted them to carry pollen from one plant’s male flower-like reproductive organs to the flower-like female reproductive organs of other.