My illustration of the female specimen of Euryplatea nanaknihali is featured on the cover of the July 2012 issue of the journal “Annals of the Entomological Society of America” (AESA).
The newly discovered species was obtained in Thailand by researchers from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. At 0.4mm, the female is 5x smaller than a fruit fly and is now the smallest fly known to science. This one-of-a-kind specimen’s tiny size made it a huge challenge to illustrate!
Click to enlarge
“It’s so small you can barely see it with the naked eye on a microscope slide. It’s smaller than a flake of pepper. The housefly looks like a Godzilla fly beside it.”
– Brian Brown, Curator of Entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County