A team of paleontologists affiliated with several institutions in Argentina, working with a colleague from the U.K., has discovered evidence of scales from lepidopterans in dung samples recovered from a dig site in Talampaya National Park, Argentina. In their paper published in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences, the group describes how they found the scales in the dung samples and what the find means for scientists who study butterflies and moths.
In 2011, digging began at a site in Talampaya National Park. As the work unfolded, it was discovered that the site had once hosted an ancient communal latrine—many different animals had used the same place over and over to urinate or defecate, including many large plant-eating animals.
Dung samples were collected from the site and sent to various places for study. One such sample wound up in Argentina’s Regional Center for Scientific Research and Technology Transfer of La Rioja, which is where the researchers involved in this new study found it.
The team took the dung sample back to their lab and studied it in a variety of ways, finding it to be approximately 236 million years old, putting it in the middle of the Triassic, and just 16 million years after the close of the end-Permian extinction event that wiped out approximately 90% of all animal species on Earth. They also found tiny (200 microns long) scales that they were able to identify as from a lepidopteran, which is a moth or butterfly.
Prior research has suggested Lepidoptera first evolved approximately 241 million years ago, but physical evidence of them only went back to 201 million years ago, leaving a gap of approximately 40 million years. The new find by the team in Argentina may help to fill in missing data from that gap. It also meant the team may have found a new species—they gave it the name Ampatiri eloisae.
The timescale, the researchers note, suggests that the newly identified species likely belonged to a subgroup called Glossata, which meant it would have had a proboscis similar to those used by modern moths and butterflies. But there would have been a major difference—flowers did not exist during the Triassic. That means that A. eloisae would have had to get its nourishment from sugary droplets produced by conifer and cycad trees.
More information:
Lucas E. Fiorelli et al, Back to the poop: the oldest hexapod scales discovered within a Triassic coprolite from Argentina, Journal of South American Earth Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jsames.2025.105584
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Oldest physical evidence of butterflies or moths discovered in 236-million-year-old poop (2025, June 7)
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