ELMO FOSSIL INSECT Statistics:

The image to the right was scanned by Roy Beckemeyer from an Elmo fossil in the possession of the Kansas State University Entomology Department.   It is a protorthopteran of the Family Lemmatophoridae,  Paraprisca fragilis (Sellards) 1909.  It was determined by Dr. Frank M. Carpenter.  Scanned in November, 1999 at Water Hall, KSU, Manhattan, Kansas.  Thanks to Dr. Ralph Charlton for allowing me access to his fossils.   See the Elmo Fossil Insects In Brief Page for additional pictures including drawings depicting how paleontologists think that this and other fossil insects might have looked.

USING CARPENTER'S most recent determinations as to the assignment to Order and Family of the various species of Kansas Permian insects, we find that this fauna is comprised of no less than:

                 17 Orders, 52 Families, 93 Genera, and 150 Species.  

(See "Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology" - volumes on Hexapoda by F.M. Carpenter, 1992 in the Bibliography for a treatment of the entire fossil insect fauna discussed to the generic level.  The species information contained in these web pages was derived by a thorough review of the 100 years of scientific literature on the Elmo fossils published by Sellards, Tillyard, Carpenter, and others.  I have updated the nomenclature and accounted for synonymies and used Carpenter's higher level taxonomy.  Many "species" described from fragmentary fossils have been synonymized as more specimens became available, so there are many names in the published work that are no longer valid.  I would appreciate being informed of any errors readers might find in these pages.)

OF THE 17 ORDERS found at Elmo, 8 are extant and the other 9 extinct.  Six of the nine extinct orders are not found after the Permian era.  Two of those are first found in the fossil record of the Permian, the rest arise earlier, in the Upper Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian).  Of the 8 extant orders, half (Odonata - the dragonflies, Psocoptera - the "book lice", Homoptera - the "true bugs", and Mecoptera - the scorpion-flies) first appear in the Permian deposits.  We can thus see that the Permian fossils provide information about insects at a time when the insect fauna was changing from the Paleozoic forms to the modern ones.  This fact, together with the quantity of both fossil specimens and species from the Elmo deposits, provides the reason for the Elmo site being considered a "Lagerstatten".

THE FOLLOWING LINK will take you to a page containing an Outline of Classification of the Superclass Hexapoda, as defined by Carpenter in his volumes of the "Treatise".  There you will be able to look at a list of all the insect orders, extant and extinct.  The Orders found to be represented in the Elmo fauna appear underlined and in magenta-colored type.  The number of fossil genera known in total, and the number of genera represented in the Elmo,  are also listed for each group, as are either an English name or brief description of each taxon.  Thus you can get a feel for the place of the Elmo fossils in the huge group of fossil and extant insects.