Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
Volume 11, Issue 100, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2014.0736
Keywords
fossil colour; structural colour; Coleoptera; iridescence; photonic crystals; photonic bandgap materials
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Funding
- IRCSET-Marie Curie International Mobility Fellowship
- Tyndall National Institute [NAP 434]
- UK Royal Society Newton Fellowship
- Linacre College EPA Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellowship
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Nature's most spectacular colours originate in integumentary tissue architectures that scatter light via nanoscale modulations of the refractive index. The most intricate biophotonic nanostructures are three-dimensional crystals with opal, single diamond or single gyroid lattices. Despite intense interest in their optical and structural properties, the evolution of such nanostructures is poorly understood, due in part to a lack of data from the fossil record. Here, we report preservation of single diamond (Fd-3m) three-dimensional photonic crystals in scales of a 735 000 year old specimen of the brown Nearctic weevil Hypera diversipunctata from Gold Run, Canada, and in extant conspecifics. The preserved red to green structural colours exhibit near-field brilliancy yet are inconspicuous from afar; they most likely had cryptic functions in substrate matching. The discovery of pristine fossil examples indicates that the fossil record is likely to yield further data on the evolution of three-dimensional photonic nanostructures and their biological functions.
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