What was the first insect

Below 40 percent of present atmospheric oxygen, ocean dead zones rapidly expand, and extinctions ramp up. Skip to content. Becoming part of Stanford's new school focused on climate and sustainability in Fall Insects took off when they evolved wings.

Clock January 23, Know your planet. Subscribe Stanford Earth Matters Magazine. A transformative effect Not only do the two most popular explanations for the Hexapod Gap appear to be unsubstantiated, the scientists said a study of the insect fossil record suggests that the Hexapod Gap itself might be an illusion. Funding for the study was provided by the National Science Foundation.

Our Planet of the Arthropods is dominated by insects, and when and how insects took over the earth is a question that's puzzled naturalists for centuries. In an incredible international effort, scientists combined their molecular, computational biology, statistics, paleontology, and taxonomic expertise to uncover some surprising conclusions about when major groups of insects evolved:.

Misof, et al. Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. Science : The back story of this research is almost as interesting as the results. Making sense of the diversity of insects in collections has traditionally been a task for a lone expert, usually specializing in just one subset of a group.

With over a million described species, it's not hard to see how someone might spend an entire life trying to make order out of biodiversity chaos. When sequencing was expensive and time consuming, the question was "which species should we do next?

With advances in both computing and Next-Generation sequencing , the speed and cost of sequencing dropped enough that scientists can band together and ask bigger questions. Brian Wiegmann of North Carolina State University Author 74 put this elegantly: "It's not enough to just catalog the books in the library; we want to understand their contents. A global crew of experts was recruited to help create an open-access inventory of transcriptomes all expressed genes in an organism for 1, insect species.

This, of course, happened somehow, but we still have no evidence of how exactly it happened. The next big advances were: being able to fold the wings to protect them; the appearance of larvae that did not compete with adults for the same food; and, in the time of the dinosaurs, the formation of societies like those of ants, termites, and bees; as well as a fruitful relationship with flowers that lasts to this day pollination.

We already know what the first insects were like, now let's see who their closest relatives are today, and why I say not only that they look alike, but that we can see them with our own eyes. This is the closest thing to an ancient insect, the silverfish:. If you are thinking that the silverfish does not look like a butterfly, fly, or whatever comes to your mind when you think of an insect, you are right.

But if we compare it with the nymph of a primitive insect, the Mayfly, the resemblance is striking:. Mayfly nymph, a primitive insect whose adult lives for a few days.

Photography: Amada We can see silverfish with our own eyes because they are found in many houses, where they eat every starchy product they find, as well as paper and cardboard, which is why they are particularly feared in libraries.

Unlike insects, which evolutionarily explored all kinds of bodies and lifestyles, the silverfish is the conservative relative, which lives today almost as its predecessors lived million years ago, opening a wonderful window to the Devonian, the cradle of land life. We use them to help improve our content, personalise it for you and tailor our digital advertising on third-party platforms.

During Beta testing articles may only be saved for seven days. Create a list of articles to read later. You will be able to access your list from any article in Discover. Insects evolved at the same time as the earliest land plants around million years ago, an international study has revealed.

The earliest fossil evidence for insects is dated at around million years old, but the new study uses genetic techniques to corroborate estimates that they evolved much earlier. Insects were the first creatures to evolve flight, developing wings around million years ago — million years before the pterosaurs, the next animals to take to the skies. The evolution of flying insects coincided with land plants growing taller to form large forests, according to the first results of the 1KITE project.