About Basiaeschna janata (Say, 1840)
Basiaeschna janata, commonly known as the springtime darner, is a dragonfly species that belongs to the genus Basiaeschna, which contains only this single living species, and the family Aeshnidae. It is a small bluish darner that flies early in the calendar year. One confirmed fossil species of the genus, †Basiaeschna alaskaensis Garrouste & Nel, 2019, has been discovered in the Chickaloon Formation of Alaska, and this fossil dates to around the time of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. This is the only definitively identified fossil member of the genus Basiaeschna. The occurrence of this fossil in Alaska indicates that ancestral Basiaeschna probably migrated from Eurasia to North America by way of Beringia. Two other fossil darners that were previously classified in the genus Basiaeschna have since been moved to the extinct genus †Oligaeschna.
