Linda Kay Grupa, Age 8, Of Houston, Tex., for her question:
When did the first insects live?
We share our world with hosts of bugs and beetles, bees and butterflies. There are far more different insects than all the other different animals you can count. And the insects have lived on earth longer, much longer than the cats and dogs, the birds and snakes and other sizable animals.
The cockroach who lives in the kitchen is a pesky bug, and he seems to know that he is not we1ccqrie to share our homes. At any rate, he scuttles to his hiding p1ace as fast as his six spiky legs will carry him. But if he knew it, the little fellow has one good reason to feel proud of himself. His family has lived on earth for at least 250 million years. All this time cockroaches have been solving their problems, escaping their enemies and making a living.
About 250 million years ago there were tangled forests of giant horsetails and ferny trees. We call them the coal forests bel'au6e later they were buried under layers of new rock and pressed into beds of sooty black coal. There were no birds and no snakes, no frogs and no furry cats in those ancient coal forests. But there were roaches and giant dragonflies.
Experts have found the fossil remains of these ancient insects in coal and layers of buried rocks. Somet1mes, when a bug died, his tiny body was pressed between a pile of fallen leaves or covered with a blanket of drifting dust. After millions of yeaxs, the leaves were changed t0 coal and the dust became hard rock. The fragile body of the little bug was pressed like a petal between the pages of a book.
Ages later its remains were found by a fossil hunter. There, between the rocky pages, was the imprint of a small body with spindly thin legs and perhaps a pair of tissue thin wings marked with lacy veins. Some of the early dragonflies of the ancient coal forests were whoppers. Their gauzy wings spread a whole yard wide from tip to tip.
All plants and animals came from parent plants and animals. The insects of 250 million years ago must have had parents. But we have no fossil records of them. We do not know when these first insect ancestors came to live in the world.. Perhaps they were here 300 million years ago or even longer, but we do not know for surf what they were like.
At last the ancient coal forests grew no more. But the first insects multiplied and branched out into all sorts of different bugs and beetles. Later, much later, the bully dinosaurs arrived and strode around the world. This was about 180 million years ago. The dinosaurs found the world already populated with the ancestors of most of our modern insects. And the insects were still here, doing splendidly, when the dinosaurs departed about 60 million years ago.