3亿年前，一只小飞虫在地球上的一块泥地上滑行着降落，并永恒保存了这一3.5厘米长的印记（如图）。
根据腿部姿态、腹部曲线，以及翅膀标记的缺乏，研究人员推测，这个印记是由一只在休息时竖起了双翼的古老蜉蝣留下的。
研究人员在4月4日出版的美国《国家科学院院刊》（PNAS）上报告说，这一采自美国马萨诸塞州东南部的化石是已知最古老的飞虫完整印记。
今天的昆虫掠过水面的本领被认为是一个现代发明。然而微小拖曳痕迹的发现意味着，蜉蝣在停止之前可能的滑行足以提醒某些古生物学家在这件事情上不抱成见。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原文出处：
PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1015948108
Late Carboniferous paleoichnology reveals the oldest full-body impression of a flying insect
Richard J. Knechta,1, Michael S. Engelb,c, and Jacob S. Bennera
Insects were the first animals to evolve powered flight and did so perhaps 90 million years before the first flight among vertebrates. However, the earliest fossil record of flying insect lineages (Pterygota) is poor, with scant indirect evidence from the Devonian and a nearly complete dearth of material from the Early Carboniferous. By the Late Carboniferous a diversity of flying lineages is known, mostly from isolated wings but without true insights into the paleoethology of these taxa. Here, we report evidence of a full-body impression of a flying insect from the Late Carboniferous Wamsutta Formation of Massachusetts, representing the oldest trace fossil of Pterygota. Through ethological and morphological analysis, the trace fossil provides evidence that its maker was a flying insect and probably was representative of a stem-group lineage of mayflies. The nature of this current full-body impression somewhat blurs distinctions between the systematics of traces and trace makers, thus adding to the debate surrounding ichnotaxonomy for traces with well-associated trace makers.
