"Me love you long time."
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Forty or so million years ago, on the southern end of the Gondwana supercontinent, two mating insects unexpectedly found themselves in a sticky situation - and not in a good way.
Somehow, this pair of busy long-legged flies (Dolichopodidae) had gotten themselves trapped in the gooey sap of a tree, and there was simply no escape. That moment spelled both the beginning and the end of this casual love affair.
Frozen in intimacy, the resin turned to amber, and the moments of copulation turned into something more enduring. In 2011, the precious scene fell into the hands of palaeontologists working in the Otway Basin of southern Australia.
At first, lead researcher Jeffrey Stilwell from Monash University said he couldn't believe his eyes. It's not unusual for small ancient creatures to be found in fossilised resin, but for some reason it's a rarity to find such specimens in the Southern Hemisphere, much less one where two creatures are frozen in the act of mating.
