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For the first time in more than 50 years, a giant lacewing (Polystoechotes punctata) has been found in eastern North America. The discovery raises new questions about the distribution of the Jurassic-era insect that mysteriously vanished from the eastern seaboard decades ago.

The giant lacewing was once abundant across North America, but in the 1800s the insects鈥� eastern population began to plummet for unknown reasons 鈥� potentially due to the rise of urban development, invasive species and artificial light. Giant lacewings had never been documented in Arkansas before, so when at Pennsylvania State University spotted an unusual insect with a roughly 50-millimetre wingspan on the facade of his local Walmart, he assumed it was from a more common group of insects called antlion.

鈥淚 picked it up and just walked around the store with it between my fingers as I did my grocery shopping and checking out, and then held it the entire way home,鈥� says Skvarla, who was a PhD student when he found the insect in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 2012. Skvarla then killed and pinned it, hoping to take a closer look, but the insect sat in storage for nearly a decade before he examined it again.

He didn鈥檛 make the revelation until 2020 while teaching a university course on insect identification over a video stream. He pulled antlion specimens from his personal collection as teaching aids and examined them under a microscope attached to his computer. 鈥淚t was immediately apparent that it wasn鈥檛 an antlion,鈥� says Skvarla, who noticed an unusually large number of veins in its wings.

Later in the lab, Skvarla tried but was unable to extract DNA from the lacewing鈥檚 leg that could have helped pinpoint its origin population 鈥� whether it was just an interloper from out west or if it was from an eastern population.

Skvarla suspects his Walmart lacewing was a member of a relic population that has managed to hold on, potentially in the nearby Ozark mountains. Finding this giant lacewing 鈥渟uggests there are likely other small populations of the insect holding on in wooded areas in the east鈥�, says at the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Locating the insect in a suburban area also demonstrates the adaptability of the species, which has lived through the extinction of dinosaurs and the industrial revolution, says at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 鈥淪ome individuals have found a way to cling on, as this intrepid little lacewing was doing on the outside of a Walmart.鈥�