Nearly 100 years ago, a British supply ship ran aground at Lord Howe, a tiny island roughly four hundred miles east of Australia. Black rats trickled off the ship, scouring the island and feasted on its native bug: a large spindly stick insect known as Dryococelus australis, or the “land lobster,” as the Conversation notes.

Within 30 years, the Lord Howe Island stick insects vanished.

Then, in 1964, climbers on a nearby volcano known as Ball’s Pyramid found a dead insect that looked suspiciously like the fabled land lobster. Decades later, researchers in 2001 found two dozen of the glossy black bugs slithering in muck, as NPR reported.

Those bugs, though, looked a little different: They were thinner, with leaner hind legs and different tail ends. For researchers, it begged the question: Were these newly found insects an evolution of the Lord Howe Island ones, or something else?

Read the full story at USA Today.

A Lord Howe Island stick-insect is held by Invertebrate Specialist Keeper Kate Price in its enclosure on Valentine’s Day at the Melbourne Zoo in Melbourne, Australia, 14 February 2017. (Photo: TRACEY NEARMY, EPA)

A Lord Howe Island stick-insect is held by Invertebrate Specialist Keeper Kate Price in its enclosure on Valentine’s Day at the Melbourne Zoo in Melbourne, Australia, 14 February 2017. (Photo: TRACEY NEARMY, EPA)