DOI: 10.5061/dryad.18931zd4f
title: Data from: A winged relative of ice crawlers in amber bridges the cryptic extant Xenonomia and a rich fossil record

description: Until the advent of phylogenomics, the atypical morphology of extant
 representatives of the insect orders Grylloblattodea (ice crawlers) and
 Mantophasmatodea (gladiators) had confounding effects on efforts to
 resolve their placement within Polyneoptera. This recent research has
 unequivocally shown that these species‐poor groups are closely related and
 form the clade Xenonomia. Nonetheless, divergence dates of these groups
 remain poorly constrained, and their evolutionary history debated, as the
 few well‐identified fossils, characterized by a suite of morphological
 features similar to that of extant forms, are comparatively young.
 Notably, the extant forms of both groups are wingless, whereas most of the
 pre‐Cretaceous insect fossil record is composed of winged insects, which
 represents a major shortcoming of the taxonomy. Here, we present new
 specimens embedded in Early Cretaceous amber from Myanmar and belonging to
 the recently described species Aristovia daniili. The abundant
 material and pristine preservation allowed a detailed documentation of the
 morphology of the species, including critical head features. Combined with
 a morphological data set encompassing all Polyneoptera, these new data
 unequivocally demonstrate that A. daniili is a winged
 stem Grylloblattodea. This discovery demonstrates that winglessness was
 acquired independently in Grylloblattodea and Mantophasmatodea.
 Concurrently, wing apomorphic traits shared by the new fossil and earlier
 fossils demonstrate that a large subset of the former “Protorthoptera”
 assemblage, representing a third of all known insect species in some
 Permian localities, are genuine representatives of Xenonomia. Data from
 the fossil record depict a distinctive evolutionary trajectory, with the
 group being both highly diverse and abundant during the Permian but
 experiencing a severe decline from the Triassic onwards.
description: The RTI file composing this dataset was derived from a set of
 photographs obtained using a light dome of about 30 cm in diameter and
 equipped with 54 LEDs, and a camera Canon EOS 5DS equipped with a MP-E 65
 mm macro lens, both driven by a control box (dome and control box,
 Flydome, Paris, France; camera body and lens, Canon, Tokyo, Japan). The 45
 usable photographs (9 were excluded due to improper exposure) were
 batch-optimized, including a ‘horizontal flipping’ step, using Adobe
 Photoshop CS6 and were further compiled into an RTI file using the RTI
 Builder software v. 2.0.2 using the HSH fitter (software freely available
 from Cultural Heritage Imaging, San Francisco, CA, USA).
description: # Data from: A winged relative of ice crawlers in amber bridges the
 cryptic extant Xenonomia and a rich fossil record ## Description of the
 Data and file structure The dataset contains a RTI (Reflectance
 Transformation Imaging) file of the fossil insect specimen MNHN.F.R51111
 (Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France), composed of
 single right forewing in ventral aspect, holotype of the species Fabrecia
 pygmaea Meunier 1911. ## Sharing/access Information The RTI file composing
 this dataset can be opened using RTIviewer (software freely available from
 Cultural Heritage Imaging, San Francisco, CA, USA).