Oscar Piastri Honoured With 98-Million-Year-Old Wasp Species Named After Him

A newly discovered species of ancient wasp has been officially named after McLaren F1 driver Oscar Piastri, in a remarkable crossover between motorsport and palaeontology.
The discovery was published in a research article for Palaeoworld: Volume 35, Issue 3, titled ‘New flat wasps (Hymenoptera: Bethylidae) from the middle Cretaceous Kachin amber of Myanmar’.
The research was carried out by Corentin Jouault from the University of Oxford, Di-Ying Huang from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, and Celso O. Azevedo from the Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo in Brazil.
The species named after the McLaren driver is called Gwesped piastrii, a 98-million-year-old fossil discovered in samples from the Noije Bum Hill, Hukawng Valley, Kachin State in Myanmar, preserved in amber.
The tiny fossil measures just 1.15mm in length and dates back to the middle Cretaceous period, making it approximately 30 million years older than the T-Rex dinosaur.
In the body description section of the research, the scientists describe Gwesped piastrii as having a body that is ‘depressed and sparsely pubescent’.
However, that physical description was not the reason the species was named in Piastri’s honour by the researchers behind the discovery.
The researchers chose to name the species after Piastri because the amber colour of the wasp reminded the first author of the iconic McLaren orange livery.
The connection between the prehistoric insect and the Formula 1 world was therefore rooted in a simple but striking visual resemblance to the McLaren team’s famous colour.
Piastri himself acknowledged the unusual honour by updating his Instagram bio and adding a picture of a bee to mark the occasion.
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