A SCOTTISH fossil that has languished in the vaults of London’s Natural History Museum since the 1920s is the world’s oldest known insect. Its existence pushes back the origin of winged insects by 80 million years, and could help solve the puzzle of why insects learned to fly.
The fossil creature, Rhyniognatha hirsti, is 400 million years old and comes from near Aberdeen. When Australian entomologist Robin John Tillyard studied it in the 1920s he reported that it might be related to insects, but he couldn’t be sure. Believing the fossil to be unremarkable, experts since then have largely ignored…
