Wings. If only, huh?
The Hexapod Gap…
“The Hexapod Gap is one of the outstanding mysteries in the history of insect evolution,” says doctoral student Sandra Schachat from Stanford. The last time anyone studied this period was a decade ago. “During the past ten years, a lot of progress has been made in understanding Romer’s Gap, which is a similar gap in the fossil record of early amphibians. My collaborators and I were inspired by this progress, so we wanted to see whether we could make progress in understanding early insects.”
As soon as fossils of the first winged insects emerged, they rapidly outnumbered arachnids and myriapods. By taking to the skies, they could escape predators and go where there was plenty of food. Wings liberated insects to colonise new niches and habitats, say the researchers. “This is a fantastic paper, done by a collaborative group of scientists,” Roy Plotnick, professor and palaeoentomologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, told The Wire.
