How Weevil got His Nuts Bolted

A musculoskeletal system so far unknown in the animal world was recently discovered in weevils. The hip of Trigonopterus oblongus does not consist of the usual hinges, but of joints based on a screw-and-nut system.Screws and nuts are known from engineering and used for the fixed connection of components. "Now, we found that nature was first in inventing screws and nuts, because weevils have been using this construction for about 100 million years already," Alexander Riedel from the Karlsruhe State Museum of Natural History says. This museum supplied the weevil samples studied. The detailed three-dimensional images of the joints were made at the national ANKA synchrotron radiation source of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Storyteller: Alexander Riedel from the Karlsruhe State Museum of Natural History