Scientists Name a New Ancient Insect Noo-Noo

Some 99 million years ago, a tiny insect with a mouth nearly twice as long as its body wandered into wet tree resin and never made it out. That stroke of bad luck turned the insect into a time capsule, and this week scientists finally gave it a name: Cretodorus noonoo, the ancient insect Noo-Noo. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Insects, the new species is a planthopper from the dinosaur age whose feeding organ worked like a flexible drinking straw, as reported by Phys.org. According to the researchers behind the study, the structure has almost no modern equivalent, making the ancient insect Noo-Noo a rare window into forests that no longer exist.

The discovery team examined 13 fossils preserved in Kachin amber from Myanmar, all belonging to Neazoniidae, an extinct family of planthoppers. Using high-resolution micro-computed tomography, they reconstructed the mouthpart's internal anatomy and found transverse folds built into its walls. Those folds gave the organ flexibility while stopping it from kinking or collapsing, a design that behaves much like a corrugated garden hose. Several fossils even show the mouthpart frozen mid-bend, which the researchers read as evidence it could flex during life. In the insect's modern relatives, the mouthparts look like a simple needle for piercing plant tissue and sipping fluids, nothing like the feeding gear of the ancient insect Noo-Noo.

So what needed a straw for a mouth? The organ pointed backward and worked as a piercing-and-sucking system aimed at tree sap, not nectar. Despite a passing resemblance to a butterfly's flexible proboscis, the researchers found no convincing pollen on any of the fossil bodies, which ruled out a role as pollinators. Instead, they propose that the new species threaded its mouthpart through narrow cracks in bark to reach deep vascular tissue, anchoring the tip with two grooved lobes that likely opened during feeding. The team compares that anchor to a wall plug expanding inside a drilled hole. It is a specialist's toolkit, built for food that stiffer mouthparts could never reach.

The research comes from Tel Aviv University's School of Zoology and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, working with the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their paper, "Flexible Drinking Straws of the Cretaceous," lays out the scans and the feeding model in full, and it is open access, so anyone can inspect the same cross-sections the authors studied. The new species therefore arrives with its evidence in the open, a habit worth cheering in a field where fossils often sit behind paywalls.

Why the Ancient Insect Noo-Noo Got a TV Name

The new species' unusual appearance inspired its scientific name. The "noonoo" part nods to the friendly vacuum cleaner from the children's series Teletubbies, whose long flexible hose resembles the insect's feeding organ. Scientists often slip playful references into Latin names, and this one doubles as a teaching aid: one glance at the fossil's straw-like mouthpart and the name makes sense. The full binomial pairs a Greek-flavored genus with the pop-culture wink. For a generation raised on childhood reruns, the ancient insect Noo-Noo is a reminder that taxonomy, for all its precision, keeps a sense of humor.

How the Ancient Insect Noo-Noo Read Dinosaur-Era Forests

The discovery may also say something larger about the woodlands of the Cretaceous. Long, corrugated feeding structures showed up in several unrelated insect groups during that period, hinting that the forests themselves rewarded the design. The resin-producing woodlands of the time carry signs of frequent fires, and trees in fire-prone settings grow thicker bark, a barrier only a long, snaking mouthpart could beat. The researchers are careful here: this is a suggestion, not a settled conclusion. But the pattern points to ecosystems organized around pressures that modern forests no longer impose. As co-author Dr. Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou put it, the ancient insect Noo-Noo offers "an extraordinary glimpse into the insect world of the age of the dinosaurs."

Why the Ancient Insect Noo-Noo Matters Now

The discovery matters because it shows evolution can solve the same problem in ways that leave no descendants: a flexible, durable feeding organ unlike anything found in living planthoppers. It also shows how much history fits inside a speck of amber, a family tree, a feeding strategy, and a forest's fire regime all preserved in one resin drop. For readers, the ancient insect Noo-Noo is also a small lesson in how science names the unknown, part precision and part playfulness. And the fossils are not finished talking: new imaging methods could still pull more detail about Cretaceous food webs from the same specimens in the years ahead.

For more on how amber preserves vanished ecosystems, see our earlier story on the feathered dinosaur fossil rewriting flight's origin, and browse the Science topic page for this week's discoveries. The next time a name like Cretodorus noonoo crosses your feed, picture the insect behind it: probing bark cracks in a burning forest, dying in a blob of resin, and waiting the better part of a hundred million years for someone to notice its straw.