Researchers have identified a 99-million-year-old insect species trapped in amber, featuring an accordion-like feeding tube nearly twice its body length. Named Cretodorus noonoo after a Teletubbies character, the prehistoric planthopper reveals an evolutionary adaptation for piercing deep into tree bark that has no modern equivalent.
Deep inside tree resin that eventually hardened into amber, a team of scientists discovered a prehistoric organism that challenges modern biological comparisons. The specimens, preserved in three dimensions, hail from amber deposits in Myanmar and date back approximately 99 million years to the Cretaceous period. Researchers examined 13 fossil specimens belonging to Neazoniidae, an ancient family of planthoppers.
Among those fossils, investigators identified a newly described species named Cretodorus noonoo. Nicknamed Noo-Noo,
the insect takes its moniker from the friendly vacuum cleaner character in the children’s television series Teletubbies, whose long, flexible hose shares a striking resemblance to the fossilized creature’s prominent facial structure.
Micro-CT Scans Reveal Accordion-Like Mouthparts
The defining anatomical feature of Noo-Noo is its extraordinary proboscis, which stretches to nearly twice the total length of the insect’s body. While living relatives of planthoppers possess simple, needle-like mouthparts designed to pierce standard plant tissues, this ancient lineage developed a specialized tube covered in dense transverse folds.
Using high-resolution micro-computed tomography, researchers reconstructed the internal geometry of the feeding organ and confirmed that the surface ridges were structural components rather than mere decoration. These accordion-like corrugations allowed the long organ to curve and bend smoothly without kinking or collapsing. Several of the examined amber samples freeze the mouthparts in visibly bent configurations, providing clear physical evidence of their flexibility during the animal’s lifetime.
“The discovery of ‘Noo-Noo’, a new species that lived 99 million years ago, gives us an extraordinary glimpse into the insect world of the age of the dinosaurs. This is not merely an insect previously unknown to science, but an animal that developed an evolutionary solution with almost no modern equivalent: a long, flexible and durable feeding organ that likely enabled it to reach food deep within tree bark.”
Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou, Steinhardt Museum of Natural History
Sap-Sucking Specialization and Bark-Anchoring Lobes
Scientists investigating the dietary habits of Noo-Noo concluded that the insect functioned as a specialist at taking sap from trees. The mouthparts likely functioned as a piercing-and-sucking system.
Instead of feeding on surface fluids, the insect likely threaded its elongated proboscis through tight fissures in woody plants to access vascular tissues. At the very tip of the feeding tube, researchers observed two distinct grooved lobes designed to open during feeding.
This expansion mechanism helped anchor the organ firmly against the interior walls of a bark crack while the insect drove its internal stylets deeper toward nutrient-rich plant fluids. Because researchers base these feeding behaviors on anatomical reconstructions rather than direct observation, they note that the bark-probing hypothesis remains a carefully reasoned interpretation of fossil morphology.
Reconstructing Cretaceous Forests and Extinct Lineages
The appearance of corrugated, highly flexible mouthparts across several unrelated Cretaceous insect groups—including some long-proboscid scorpionflies—points toward an independent evolutionary response to shared environmental pressures. Researchers suggest that forests of the time and the insects of the time may also have broader significance for the understanding of Cretaceous forests.
Alongside describing the new species, the published study moves the previously unplaced genus Spinonympha into Neazoniidae.
Most of these long-mouthed insect lineages eventually vanished as ancient ecosystems shifted over tens of millions of years. Specimens like Cretodorus noonoo provide physical evidence for how prehistoric insects exploited specialized ecological niches during the age of dinosaurs.
