A partial dragonfly wing found in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park has been identified as Cordualadensa acorni, a new species and the first known dragonfly from Canada’s dinosaur-aged rocks. The roughly 75-million-year-old fossil also marks the first known North American member of the dragonfly group Cavilabiata.
What was discovered?
The specimen is not a complete insect. It is a partial wing preserved as an impression in rock from Alberta’s Dinosaur Park Formation, a Late Cretaceous (Campanian) unit famous for dinosaur fossils.
Researchers named the species Cordualadensa acorni and established a new family, Cordualadensidae, because the wing has a combination of anatomical features not seen in previously known dragonflies. The species name honors John Acorn, a University of Alberta lecturer, entomologist and science communicator.
The wing was about the width of a human hand when the dragonfly was alive. That estimate indicates a relatively small animal, but size alone does not reflect its ecological role in a Cretaceous wetland ecosystem.
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Where and when was the fossil found?
Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta
The fossil came from the Dinosaur Park Formation at Dinosaur Provincial Park. The formation is approximately 75 million years old, placing the dragonfly in the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, when dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems.
A 2023 field-course discovery
A McGill University undergraduate uncovered the wing during a 2023 vertebrate-paleontology field course led by Professor Hans Larsson. Students were cracking rocks in an area already known for leaf fossils. The appearance of an insect wing was unexpected because insect fossils from the formation had been almost unknown.
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Why is this fossil important?
It fills a major evolutionary gap
The specimen helps address an approximately 30-million-year gap in the known dragonfly fossil record. Its anatomy adds evidence from a period for which the evolutionary history of several dragonfly lineages has been poorly documented.
It is a geographic first
Cordualadensa acorni is the first known North American representative of Cavilabiata. It is also the first reported dragonfly fossil from Canada’s dinosaur-aged rocks. Those claims refer specifically to the known fossil record; they do not mean that no other dragonflies lived in the region or that future finds cannot change the record.
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Its wing suggests gliding ability
The wing structure indicates adaptation for gliding. Gliding is associated with migratory dragonflies living today, so the fossil raises the possibility that similar flight capabilities contributed to the group’s long-term success. The anatomy supports that evolutionary hypothesis, but it cannot by itself demonstrate that this individual species migrated.
What does the preservation tell us about the site?
Before this discovery, the only insect reported from the Dinosaur Park Formation was a microscopic aphid preserved in amber. The dragonfly is different: it is an impression fossil in sedimentary rock rather than an insect trapped in amber.
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That preservation style was previously unknown for insects at the site. After finding the wing, the team broadened both the areas it searched and the methods it used, and began recovering additional insect fossils. The results suggest that the formation’s insect diversity may have been substantially underestimated rather than genuinely absent.
What remains unknown?
- The rest of the dragonfly’s body was not recovered, so its exact appearance, sex and life history cannot be reconstructed.
- A wing can reveal aspects of flight mechanics, but it cannot establish the insect’s precise habitat, prey or migration route.
- The hand-width estimate describes the reported wingspan scale; it is not a measurement of a complete preserved specimen.
Where was the study published?
The description appears in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences in a 2025 paper by André S. Mueller, Alexandre V. Demers-Potvin and Hans C.E. Larsson, titled “New family of fossil dragonfly (Odonata, Cavilabiata) from the Late Cretaceous (Campanian) Dinosaur Park Formation, Alberta, Canada.” The paper’s DOI is 10.1139/cjes-2024-0162.
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