Arkansas Walmart on the hunt for milk turned up a giant discovery that a man will never soon forget – a Jurassic-era insect thought to have disappeared from eastern North America.Back in 2012, Michael Skvarla was a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas when he spotted the giant insect along a store’s facade in Fayetteville.The entomology student carefully put it in his hand and took it home, where he forgot about the specimen for years.Fast-forward nearly a decade later, and Skvarla, now the director of Penn State University’s Insect Identification Lab, decided to show students what his personal insect collection looked like while under a microscope.During a live zoom class, Skvarla discovered that what he once labeled your average day insect was anything but.The Polystoechotes punctata or giant lacewing was collected in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 2012. (Michael Skvarla / Penn State / FOX Weather) "We were watching what Dr.
Skvarla saw under his microscope, and he’s talking about the features and then just kinda stops," Codey Mathis, a doctoral candidate in entomology at Penn State, stated. "We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing.