For nearly 40 years, one of the strangest insects ever found was hiding in plain sight, mislabeled as a baby crustacean. The flattened fossil from West Texas looked like little more than a dark smudge ...

How the Chosha praecursor insect may have looked. (Tihelka et al., Nature, 2026) As strange cases of mistaken identity go, this story is a difficult one to beat. A fossil dating back some 324 million ...