Response to “An exceptionally preserved 110 million years old praying mantis provides new insights into the predatory behaviour of early mantodeans”
1
Department of Invertebrate Zoology, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland, Ohio, United States
2
Department of Biology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Paleontology, Zoology
- Keywords
- Mantodea, praying mantis, raptorial appendage, cursorial appendages, predatory behavior, fossil, Santanmantis axelrodi, rebuttal, behavior
- Copyright
- © 2017 Brannoch et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Response to “An exceptionally preserved 110 million years old praying mantis provides new insights into the predatory behaviour of early mantodeans”. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3169v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3169v1
Abstract
Hörnig, Haug, & Haug (2017) published a description of a new specimen of Santanmantis axelrodi MB.I.2068, an extinct species of praying mantis from the Crato Formation of Brazil. According to Hörnig et al. (2017) the discovery of this new specimen brought with it implications for praying mantis character evolution and predatory behavior and it is with these lines of reasoning that we find fault. More specifically, we point to four flawed assumptions in their study that led to their unsubstantiated conclusion that S. axelrodi employed their mesothoracic legs in prey capture.
Author Comment
This manuscript is a response to Hörnig, Haug, & Haug (PeerJ 2017, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3605 , pp: 1–19).