There ’s a whole menses in the evolution of forward-looking dirt ball that ’s pretty much a blank , thanks to a gaping hole in the fogy records . The so called Hexapoda Gap runs from 385 million years ago to 325 million years ago . It ’s right around when the worm earthly concern changed from the old , wingless insects to the unbelievable diversity of the forward-looking coinage — and it ’s a period of time that we do n’t have intercourse much about . A new fogy discovered in Belgium might just plug some of that interruption , and show the origins of the flying bugs we know and bang .
The dodo is describedin this week ’s Nature , and has been dubbed Strudiella devonica . Dated to the Late Devonian , around 370 million years ago , this 8 mm long fogy has a “ six - legged thorax , foresighted single - branched antennae , triangular jaws and a 10 - segment venter , ” all features that would tug it into the context of an louse — and mayhap the oldest complete insect fossil ever name .
While this specimen itself was wingless , a bit of features seem to suggest that by this power point species had already start to diversify , and the unbelievable breadth of insect had started to get up — importantly to begin with than the 325 million years ago that most fast louse fossils set out to crop up . In fact , while this fossil itself does n’t have wing , it may just be a houri , andcould even have had wings as an grownup .
There ’s still a huge amount we do n’t recognize about the evolution of worm , thanks to an incredibly patchy fossil book . But discoveries like this put us well on the way to understand how they grew wings and took to the sky .
BiologyEvolutionInsectsScience
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