THEY WERE ALIVE ON EARTH LONG BEFORE THE DINOSAURS!

Insects have been living on our planet for 4OO million years. This means that they first emerged millions of years before dinosaurs and flowering plants. And at certain times during Earth’s prehistoric past, there was a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere

Meganeura

Size: its body was 43 centimetres long, while its wings were even bigger, stretching to 7O centimetres.

Size comparison: 12 times bigger than a modern-day dragonfly.

Lived: 298 million years ago.

This gigantic dragonfly was than there is today. Some scientists think this extra oxygen gave some types of animals, including insects and crustaceans, the energy to grow far bigger than similar species that are alive now. Here are four examples of the giant creepy-crawlies that once roamed Earth… probably the largest insect in history. It was so big that scientists think it may have eaten animals as large as frogs and squirrels. And, using the same technique as a modern dragonfly, Meganeura could flap its its front and back wings separately, allowing it to hover and to fly both forwards and backwards.

OTHER PREHISTORIC CREEPY-CRAWLIES

Arthropleura

Size: more than 2 and a half metres long.

Anomalocaris

Size: almost 2 metres long.

Size comparison: 25 times bigger than a modern shrimp. Lived: 49O million years ago.

Looking like a cross between a squid and a giant shrimp, Anomalocaris was a strange-looking underwater predator with big eyes. It used the two large stalks, or mandibles, that extended out in front of its mouth to pull its prey towards its razor-sharp teeth.

Size comparison: 1OO times bigger than a modern-day millipede. Lived: about 3OO million years ago.

Think of a centipede or millipede of a size that you might find in a park or garden. Now imagine a millipede as big as a crocodile. Meet Arthropleura, illustrated below, the largest known invertebrate ever to live on land. You will probably be relieved to hear that this monstrous millipede only ate plants.

Jaekelopterus

Size: 2.4 metres long.

Size comparison: 4O times bigger than a modern-day scorpion. Lived: 39O million years ago.

Jaekelopterus was a super-sized sea scorpion that hunted its prey along the seabed. Scientists think that some prehistoric fish gradually evolved bony plates of armour just to protect themselves from this enormous underwater predator.

 Continued from previous page lenses. Each lens can focus light and detect colour, and together they give an insect a picture of its surroundings. Dragonflies need to have superb eyesight to be able to hunt and catch their prey in mid-air. This is why each of a dragonfly’s eyes is made up of approximately 28,000 tiny lenses.

B Moths’ antennae give them an amazing sense of smell. For example, a male emperor moth can smell a female moth from more than 11 kilometres away.

B A bombardier beetle (pictured below) can spray attackers with a hot, foul-smelling liquid squirted from its bottom.

B The first animals to reach outer space were fruit flies. On February 20th, 1947, the United States put fruit flies aboard captured German V-2 rockets to study radiation exposure at high altitudes. In 3 minutes and 10 seconds of flight, the fruit flies reached an altitude of 110 kilometres.

B A cockroach can live for up to three months without its head.

B An ironclad’s exoskeleton (pictured on the right) is so strong it can survive being run over by a car.

B Scientists have discovered 1.5 million species of insects so far. They estimate that there may be as many as

9 million more species still waiting to be discovered.

B Malaysian ants sacrifice their own lives to defend the colony. The soldier ants can force their bodies to explode and spray sticky poison over attackers.

B The red postman butterfly develops its own poison by eating toxic plants.

B Adult female glow-worms have a large, light-producing organ at the end of their abdomens. At night they use a bright, steady stream of yellowish-green light to attract flying males. During the day they burrow underground to avoid predators. A female will climb to a high point, such as a grass stem, and turn her glowing light upwards. This makes her as visible as possible to flying males. Glow-worms’ lights are bioluminescent, which is the natural production of light by an organism created by a chemical reaction.

B Ladybirds sometimes pretend to be dead in order to fool potential predators.

B Two of the fastest-flying insects are hawk moths, which can fly at speeds of up to 53 kph, and dragonflies, which can fly even faster at 56 kph!

B The insects with the longest lifespans are periodical cicadas, which spend more than 16 years underground before emerging to the surface to mate and lay eggs.

B When food is scarce, locusts can gather into giant swarms before flying off in search of food. A swarm of locusts can include 50 billion individual insects.

B A single honeybee colony can produce 100 kilograms of honey in a single year. That’s enough to honey to fill 220 jars.

B A dung beetle can pull more than 1,100 times its own weight, which is equivalent to a human pulling six double-decker buses.

B Some species of male stoneflies do press-ups to attract female stoneflies.

B The Saharan silver ant runs 86 centimetres per second, which is equivalent to a human sprinting 200 metres in one second.

B A grasshopper can leap 20 times its own body length, which is equivalent to a human jumping the entire length of a basketball court.

B Relative to their size, the small aquatic insects called

Continued on next page  water boatmen are the loudest animals on Earth. Male water boatmen ‘sing’ at volumes of up to 99 decibels to attract a mate. They create this sound by rubbing part of their body against ridges on their abdomen, often ‘singing’ in chorus with other males.

 Continued from previous page use their long necks to fight each other in order to compete for mates.

B Lesser water boatmen breathe underwater by carrying around a bubble of air collected at the surface.

B A bee can beat its wings 190 times a second, which is 11,400 times a minute.

B Male giraffe weevils (pictured below)

B Every autumn, monarch butterflies (pictured right) migrate thousands of miles from Canada to Mexico. The typical lifespan of a monarch is just two months. But those butterflies who are born before the journey south are able to live longer, for seven months. They spend the winter in Mexico and then lay eggs. The original butterflies that migrated die as they begin the journey back to Canada. So it is the second, third, or fourth generation of butterflies that eventually returns. How the new butterflies find their way, having never made the trip before, is a mystery. Scientists think that they are born with a knowledge of which direction to travel, and that they then use the position of the Sun in the sky to calculate their route.