A FORMER Weymouth Grammar School pupil has discovered a previously unknown species of aphid after buying a Jurassic Park-style fossilised insect on eBay.

Dr Richard Harrington, who is a scientist and vice-president of the Royal Entomological Society, bought the tiny fossil from a man in Lithuania for £20 using the online auction site.

The fossil is encased in a 40-50 million-year-old piece of amber, similar to one in the blockbuster film Jurassic Park.

He then sent it to a fossil aphid expert in Denmark, Professor Ole Heie, who confirmed the insect was a new species, now extinct.

Dr Harrington, 53, has had the species named after him - Mindarus harringtoni.

He now lives in Hertfordshire but his parents John and Pat Harrington live at Littlesea in Weymouth and his sister Sue Payne in Lindens Close, Weymouth.

Dr Harrington said: "It's the first time I've had anything named after me. It makes me feel like an old fossil. I wanted to call it Mindarus ebayi but it's rather frowned upon to give frivolous names to scientific specimens so Professor Heie decided to call it after me."

Dr Harrington works at the Centre for Bioenergy and Climate Change in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, leading a team of people to monitor aphids, which are crop pests. A colleague first drew his attention to the 3-4mm fossilised aphid and Dr Harrington paid out of his own pocket to get a closer look at it.

He said: "We thought we could identify it down to the level of genus, but we had no idea what the species was.

"I sent it to Professor Heie and he checked his collection and various records and decided it had not been described before."

Professor Heie published an article on the find and since then Dr Harrington has attracted great attention.

Dr Harrington said: "Insects in amber are not rare. It's quite possible a few of them have not been described before. It just so happened this has fallen into the hands of somebody who knows how to check it out."

The fossilised aphid has now been donated to the Natural History Museum. Dr Harrington said: "You can't put a price on it. It's of not much monetary value, it's of scientific interest, which is a different currency really. I just paid £20 for it and it's been huge fun."