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An early caterpillar that lived alongside the dinosaurs had sharp spines along its back to defend against predators.

It is the first example of an armoured caterpillar so early in evolutionary history. The find suggests that caterpillars 鈥� the larval form of lepidopteran insects (known commonly as butterflies and moths) 鈥� were already diversifying at an early stage of their existence.

Butterflies and moths originated during the dinosaur era, but until now we had found and just four fossil caterpillars from that time. This is an unfortunate lack of data given that lepidopterans spend most of their lives as caterpillars, says Joachim Haug at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.

Haug says all of the dinosaur-era caterpillars we had seen were 鈥渘ormal鈥�, consisting of a 鈥渨ormy thing with some feet on it and that鈥檚 it鈥�.

He bought a fossil caterpillar, preserved in amber from Myanmar, on eBay. The amber it comes from is 100 million years old, putting it in the Cretaceous period. With his wife, Carolin Haug, also at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he has now described the caterpillar.

Its trunk had 12 segments, each of which had at least three pairs of spines on the upper side. The spines probably defended the caterpillar against hungry predators, says Joachim Haug. Birds 鈥� a group of specialised feathered dinosaurs 鈥� had evolved by this time so may well have been the main threat, just as they are for modern caterpillars. 鈥淭here鈥檚 quite a diversity of birds already in the Cretaceous,鈥� he says.

The spiny fossil indicates that caterpillars were already evolving a range of forms in the Cretaceous, says Haug.

However, they don鈥檛 seem to have been very numerous. Instead, the ecosystem was dominated by another group of insects called lacewings.

But after the mass extinction event 66 million years ago that wiped out the non-bird dinosaurs, the number of lacewings declined, and butterflies and moths expanded.