Thursday, February 12, 2004

World's oldest insect found, in a drawer. Here's the first couple paragraphs of the New York Times story: "Scientists say they have discovered the world's oldest known insect fossil a 400 million-year-old set of minuscule jaws that lay unrecognized for nearly a century in a lonely drawer at the Natural History Museum in London.
The findings, being published on Thursday in the journal Nature, pushes the date for the appearance of insects, one of the most successful life forms on earth, some 10 million to 20 million years back in the fossil record. And they suggest that insects were among the first animals to live on land."

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