In the rolling badlands of Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park — a place better known for towering fossilized skeletons of dinosaurs — an entirely different prehistoric predator has emerged from the rock.
But this one had no teeth, no claws, and no bones at all. It had wings.
In 2023, during a McGill University paleontology field course, an undergraduate student cracked open a slab of rock and revealed something no one had ever seen in Canada before: the fossilized wing of a Cretaceous dragonfly, preserved for 75 million years.
The wing was delicate, laced with a network of veins like frozen lightning, yet distinct enough to reveal it belonged to a species unknown to science. The discovery, published this week in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, marks the first-ever dragonfly fossil found in Canada’s dinosaur-aged rocks — and it’s rewriting a piece of evolutionary history that had been missing for tens of millions of years.
From Student Surprise to Scientific Breakthrough
“We were cracking rocks in an area where we’d been finding lots of fossil leaves,” recalls André Mueller, lead author of the study and now a Master’s student in McGill’s Department of Biology. “When the partial wing appeared, we all just stared at it. We weren’t expecting insects at all.”
Mueller was working under the guidance of paleontologist Prof. Hans Larsson, who has led countless field expeditions into the fossil-rich layers of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Yet even Larsson was astonished. For decades, the park’s fossil fame has rested on its dinosaur bones and ancient plant life. Insects — the tiny, fluttering backdrop of the Mesozoic world — had barely left a trace here. The only previous find was a microscopic aphid entombed in amber.
This new discovery didn’t just add another species to the park’s fossil record — it doubled the known insect diversity from the site in a single stroke.
Naming a Winged Ghost
The team named the new species Cordualadensa acorni, a name carrying two tributes. “Cordualadensa” reflects the distinctive dense vein pattern of its wings, while “acorni” honors John Acorn, the University of Alberta entomologist and beloved science communicator known for celebrating Alberta’s natural history on his TV series Acorn, the Nature Nut.
Its wingspan stretched about the width of a human hand — modest by dragonfly standards, but still an agile hunter in the skies above the late Cretaceous plains. Mueller can’t help but imagine it in motion: “It would have been part of the food chain, a fast-moving snack for small predatory dinosaurs or pterosaurs.”
A Window Into Lost Time
The fossil comes from the Dinosaur Park Formation, a geologic layer dating back 75 million years to when Alberta was warm, lush, and teeming with life. But in the story of dragonfly evolution, there’s a frustrating blank spot — a 30-million-year gap where almost no fossils exist to track how these insects changed.
Cordualadensa acorni now fills a critical part of that gap. It belongs to a large group of dragonflies called Cavilabiata, which today includes species famous for their long-distance migrations.
“The anatomy of the wing suggests it was built for gliding,” says Larsson. “That’s a trait we see in modern migratory dragonflies, and it may have been key to their evolutionary success.”
A New Way of Seeing Fossils
Perhaps just as remarkable as the fossil itself is how it was preserved. Unlike the amber-trapped aphid found years earlier, this dragonfly left its mark as an impression fossil — a shadowy imprint in stone that captured the fine geometry of its wing veins in mineral detail.
“This represents a completely new mode of insect preservation in the park,” explains co-author Alexandre Demers-Potvin, now a postdoctoral fellow at McGill. “It opens the door to finding more insects if we know where — and how — to look.”
Since the discovery, the team has expanded their search into different sediment layers and rock types. Already, they’re finding more traces of ancient insects, hinting that the skies above Dinosaur Provincial Park may have once buzzed with far greater diversity than anyone imagined.
Beyond Bones: Completing the Picture
In a place dominated by the fossilized remains of massive dinosaurs, it’s easy to forget the world they inhabited was alive with smaller, more fragile creatures. Dragonflies, beetles, ants, and other insects were the pollinators, scavengers, and prey that kept the ecosystem running.
“This specimen adds an important missing piece to one of the most diverse dinosaur-bearing sites in the world,” Larsson says. “It’s a reminder that to understand prehistoric life, we need to look beyond the big animals. The tiny ones tell just as much about how ancient ecosystems worked.”
In the end, the fossil of Cordualadensa acorni is more than just a beautifully preserved insect wing. It’s a bridge across 30 million lost years, a whisper from a vanished sky, and a sign that even in one of the most studied fossil sites on Earth, nature still keeps its secrets — until a curious student, with a careful hammer blow, sets them free.
More information: André S. Mueller et al, New family of fossil dragonfly (Odonata, Cavilabiata) from the late Cretaceous (Campanian) Dinosaur Park Formation, Alberta, Canada, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1139/cjes-2024-0162
