Researchers have discovered a new fly, which they have named Cascoplecia insolitis, that was said to have lived during the time of the dinosaurs 100 million years ago in the jungles of Myanmar.  A single specimen of the monster-like fly was preserved in Burmese amber. 

Scientists are nicknaming the fly the "unicorn" fly because it has a small horn that emerges from its head and on top of the horn are three eyes.  Because of the unusual characteristics of this fly, researchers have placed it in a new family, genus and species of fly.

“If we had seen nothing but the wings of this insect, it would have looked similar to some other flies in the family Bibionomorpha,” Poinar said. “But this was near the end of the Early Cretacous when a lot of strange evolutionary adaptations were going on. Its specialized horn and eyes must have given this insect an advantage on very tiny flowers, but didn’t serve as well when larger flowers evolved. So it went extinct.”

The fly also had other very unusual characteristics, the study found, such as an odd-shaped antenna, unusually long legs that would have helped it crawl over flowers and extremely small vestigial mandibles that would have limited it to nibbling on very tiny particles of food.

“None of the specialized body characters of Cascoplecia occurs on previously reported Cretaceous bibionids,” the report concluded. “This ‘unicorn’ fly was one of the oddities of the Cretaceous world and was obviously an evolutionary dead end.”

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