Lebanese amber is, to date, the oldest amber with intensive biological inclusions, and it is a very important material as its formation is contemporaneous with the appearance and beginning of radiation of flowering plants, with all what follows of co-evolution between pollinators and flowering plants. Molecular dating suggested that the family Culicidae arose during the Jurassic, but previously the oldest record was mid-Cretaceous.Here we have one from the early Cretaceous, about 30 million years before.

The Culicidae family of arthropods includes more than 3,000 species of mosquitoes. The new findings suggest that male mosquitoes in the past fed on blood as well, according to the researchers. They also help to narrow the "ghost-lineage gap" for mosquitoes, they say. Female mosquitoes are notorious for their blood-feeding ways, which has made them a major vector for spreading infectious diseases. Hematophagy in insects is thought to have arisen as a shift from piercing-sucking mouthparts used to extract plant fluids.

In the new study, experts describe two male mosquitoes with piercing mouthparts, including an exceptionally sharp, triangular mandible and elongated structure with small, tooth-like denticles. They report that the mosquitoes' preservation in amber extends the definitive occurrence of the mosquito family of insects into the early Cretaceous. It also suggests that the evolution of hematophagy was more complicated than had been suspected, with hematophagous males in the distant past.