IMAGINE if a whale sprouted legs and crawled back onto the land. It’s not as crazy as it sounds: the lowly stick insect has proved that even more complex anatomical features can disappear and reappear over the course of evolution.
On a number of occasions in the past 300 million years, stick insects have lost their wings, then re-evolved them. Entomologists have described it as a “revolutionary” finding that will force them to rethink one of the rules of evolution.
Michael Whiting, an evolutionary biologist from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and his team stumbled upon the finding while…
