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Originally Posted by pleezed1
My mother just sent me this picture from Virginia in an email. She said she looked on the web for it but had never seen anything like it. I've looked and looked and finally found this message !
It looks like the same bug to me. I've seen one before but never had a camera to take a picture. Sorry to not be of any help besides corroboration but Mom and I would love to know what this thing is.
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It is not the same. The first was a dragonfly whose wings had not expanded yet. This is a dragonfly with expanded wings, but it has some coloured parts to its wings, which are showing prominently in comparison to the rest of the wing which is transparent. This is a feature of some species.
The insects shown also have flattened bodies, rather than the more tube-like bodies of our classic image of a dragonflies. But this is just part of the range of variation in body shape in dragonflies. Skimmers (Libellula)
Libellula - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia have such flattened bodies, for example. Some of them also have partly coloured wings - the 12-spot skimmer has already been mentioned, but it has 12 coloured areas on its wings, rather than the two we see here.
It is not a dobsonfly. Those have quite different heads and wings.