Insects first appeared 300 million years ago, even further back in time than dinosaurs. The oldest definitive insect fossil being the Rhyniognatha hirsti, estimated at407 to 396 million years ago. Insects were around 100 million years before dinosaurs and 350 million years before humans (the first humans are only 100,000 years old). From all the early prehistoric insect species, only cockroaches have survived. Most of the insect orders seen today were around 180 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period.
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Rhyniognatha hirsti
– James Ph. Kotsybar
Four hundred and eight million years or more
ago, these mandibled arthropods were alive.
Left years to languish in the fossil drawer,
unearthed again, just crushed remains survive.
These natives of what would be Aberdeen,
by nearly thirty million years, predate
the oldest bugs that anyone had seen –
New York’s silverfish must now abdicate.
Their body shape seems to exemplify
what we today can still identify –
ancestors of our modern dragonfly –
and that they had four wings we can imply.
What does it matter? What’s it signify?
Once life emerged from seas, it learned to fly.