New Species of Insect Identified using Facebook [VIDEO]

Researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks identified a new species of insect in an unorthodox but increasingly common manner: by crowdsourcing information from Facebook.

While working on Prince of Wales Island, researchers Derek Sikes and Jill Stockbridge discovered an insect they were virtually clueless about.

"We process thousands of Alaskan insect specimens into our collections at the University of Alaska Museum every year so it's rare that we see something that throws us for a loop," Stockbridge said.

"I called Derek, the Curator of Insects for the museum, into the lab and asked him what kind of insect this was and he didn't even know the order!" she said.

Stumped, the researchers went online and posted a photo of the creature to Facebook to their colleagues could offer opinions.

Most of the suggestions were wrong, the researchers said. But one Facebooking colleague, entomologist Michael Ivie from Montana State University, recognized the 2mm-long flea-like insect to be of the genus Caurinus - a relatively unknown species thought to live only in Washington and Oregon.

As it turns out, the enigmatic insect belongs to the order Mecoptera, which includes the scorpionflies, hangingflies and snow scorpionflies, and its find may help scientists better understand the evolutionary origins of fleas. Its official name is Caurinus tlagu.

Sikes, who acted as the lead author of the taxonomic description of the new insect, was excited by the find.

"In addition to being the second known species of such an usual group of insects, we were excited to learn from fossil evidence that these two species belong to a group that probably dates back over 145 million years, to the Jurassic!" he said in a statement.

The description of the new insect is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.