This Amateur Fossil Hunter Discovered a 151-Million-Year-Old Insect—and It's a New Species

Retired teacher Robert Beattie, now 82, has been digging up remnants of the past ever since he was a child

Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent

November 13, 2025 2:27 p.m.

Scientists have identified a new species of non-biting midge—a type of small fly—from 151-year-old specimens discovered by an amateur fossil hunter. Louise Reily / Australian Museum

Amateur fossil hunter Robert Beattie has been searching for remnants of the past ever since he was a child. Now, some of his specimens have led to a scientific breakthrough: Based on Beattie’s fossils, researchers have identified a new species of non-biting midge—a type of small fly—that lived roughly 151 million years ago.

The findings, detailed in a paper published in the journal Gondwana Research, shed new light on how midges evolved, challenging long-held assumptions about the tiny insects’ origins.

Fun Fact: For paleontologists, age is just a number

Age-old fossils draws people of all ages into paleontology—and many noteworthy paleontologists came to the field after getting hooked in their early years. Mary Anning, now recognized as one of the greatest fossil hunters of all time, excavated a complete Ichthyosaurus skeleton while still a teen, and Kamoya Kimeu, a paleontological legend who discovered more than 50 ground-breaking early human specimens, began professionally hunting fossils as a teenager, continuing it until his death at age 84.

Beattie, an 82-year-old retired teacher, found his first fossil—a shell in a rock—while vacationing with his family as a boy in 1948, reports the Guardian’s Donna Lu. Since then, his hobby has taken him all over eastern Australia.

For years, he’s brought his finds to the Australian Museum in Sydney. And a set of fossils Beattie found at the Talbragar Fish Beds fossil site in New South Wales recently caught the attention of museum paleontologists.

Matthew McCurry was one of the researchers who worked on the paper. Louise Reily / Australian Museum

When they examined the specimens more closely, they realized Beattie had unearthed something special—not just a previously unknown species, but the oldest non-biting midge fossil ever found in the Southern Hemisphere. “We really didn’t understand the importance until we started studying them quite recently,” Matthew McCurry, a paleontologist at the Australian Museum who co-authored the study with Beattie and colleagues, tells the Guardian.

Scientists named the new creature Telmatomyia talbragarica, which means “fly from the stagnant waters.” That’s a nod to the freshwater pond where the creature likely lived 151 million years ago, during the Australian Jurassic period.

Based on fossils found in China and Siberia, scientists had long assumed that non-biting midges originated in the Northern Hemisphere on the supercontinent of Laurasia. But Beattie’s discovery suggests otherwise. Now, it seems more likely the insects first emerged in the Southern Hemisphere, on the Gondwana supercontinent—a theory further supported by the diverse array of non-biting midges that still live in the Southern Hemisphere today.

T. talbragarica had a rare physiological feature called a suction disk, which likely helped the insects stick to rocks in rough waters. Scientists say this trait also supports the Southern Hemisphere origination theory, implying the midge adapted to life in Gondwana over a long period of time, rather than arriving there from China or Siberia more recently.

The discovery also highlights a major problem in fossil research, the researchers say: a Northern Hemisphere bias which has likely warped scientists’ understanding of the evolution of life on Earth.

“If you look at any map of where fossils are being found, the hotspots are always in the Northern Hemisphere,” McCurry tells the Guardian. That could be a bias, he notes, because of a larger number of working paleontologist and better funding for the field. “We’re putting so much more effort into finding fossils in the Northern Hemisphere—that results in biases in our understanding of the past as well,” he adds.

The midge lived in a freshwater lake on the supercontinent Gondwana. Valentyna Inshyna

Looking ahead, the scientists hope to find even more non-biting midge fossils in the Southern Hemisphere. Additional discoveries, along with genetic analyses, could help them piece together even more of the creatures’ evolutionary story. They are especially curious to know how the insects dispersed after the Gondwana supercontinent broke up, a process that likely gave rise to the insect group’s biodiversity and geographic distribution today.

“There are long-standing questions about the way Southern Hemisphere biotas formed and changed through geological time,” co-author Steve Trewick, an evolutionary ecologist at Massey University, says in a statement from the Doñana Biological Station. “Fossils species of tiny, delicate freshwater insects like the Talbragar fly are rare and help us interpret the history of life on our planet.”

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