as you will see, a series of miraculous events happened a long time ago, when at the same moment, several unrelated lineages of insects ‘invented’ multilayered reflective metallic surface. Let me repeat – this miracle should have happened at the same evolutionary moment, INDEPENDENTLY, in various unrelated species, 99 millions years ago. By random mutations. Seriously, how absurd does that sound ? Who can believe this ?
a quote from a Royal Society paper:
Structural colours, nature’s most pure and intense colours, originate when light is scattered via nanoscale modulations of the refractive index. Original colours in fossils illuminate the ecological interactions among extinct organisms and functional evolution of colours. Here, we report multiple examples of vivid metallic colours in diverse insects from mid-Cretaceous amber.
The occurrence of structural colours in several unrelated lineages of wasps and beetles demonstrates multiple repeated evolutionary origins of ML (Multilayer Reflectors) in these groups by about 99 Ma.
full article:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.0301