A
smattering of white spots found among the ink in medieval books aren't just
printing errors — they're actually an amazingly detailed "fossil"
record of European beetles, new research finds.
The
dots represent spots, or wormholes, where hatching
beetles chewed their way out of the woodblocks used to print art
and illustrations between the 1400s and 1800s.
This
literary record reveals that two species that now overlap in Western Europe
once kept their distance from each other along the entire continent. Without
evidence of the wormholes, this history would have been impossible to discern,
said study researcher Blair Hedges, a biologist at Pennsylvania State
University.
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