Paleobotanists have discovered preserved prehistoric butterfly fossils from two digging sites in Asia which looks quite similar to the modern winged-insects. The butterfly is called kalligrammatid lacewings or Oregramma illecebrosa that lived more than 120 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era, per FOX News.

One of the traits that both the prehistoric and modern butterflies have is the wing markings known as eye spots. The report also noted that it is these recently discovered fossils of butterflies are very much preserved because of limited oxygen exposure from the mid-Jurassic period up to the early stages of the Cretaceous period.

According to a report by Science Daily, the discovery was made by paleobotanist David Dilcher of Indiana University, who also made headlines last year as by reporting the a prehistoric flower. The team also included Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History curator Conrad Labandeira and Dong Ren from China's Capital Normal University in Beijing.

"Poor preservation of lacewing fossils had always stymied attempts to conduct a detailed morphological and ecological examination of the kalligrammatid. Upon examining these new fossils, however, we've unraveled a surprisingly wide array of physical and ecological similarities between the fossil species and modern butterflies, which shared a common ancestor 320 million years ago," Dilcher said.

The preserved fossils were excavated from ancient lake deposits in northeastern China and eastern Kazakhstan. Dilcher also noted that the species found are examples of convergent evolution where two distantly related organisms develop similar characteristics.

Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History paleobotanist Conrad Labandeira added that the kalligrammatid lacewings became extinct around 50 million years ago. He also explains that these species were already known to the scientific community for over 100 years and preserved fossils were also found back in 2004 and 2012 in the same Chinese region, per Smithsonian Science News.

"The extinction of the kalligrammatids is probably attributable to the extinction of their host plants resulting from the expansion of the angiosperms. Gymnosperm herbivores and pollinators bit the dust because there was a major transformation in the global flora," Labandeira said.

"What's more, in butterflies things like wing coloration is under genetic control. We also believe the overall genetic developmental program of these two totally unrelated lineages is similar," he added.

Labandeira pointed out that kalligrammatids and butterflies both have proboscis, wing scales and wing eye spots as well as the same feeding biology and genetics developmental program. The team also did some chemical composition testing on Kalligrammatid's eyespots and found out that melanin was present, the same pigment found in modern owl butterflies.