Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/125

 AND OTHER ANCIENT INSECTS

beds of the Carboniferous deposits, when insects were already fully winged. This fact shows how cautious we must be in making negative statements concerning the extinct inhabitants of the earth, for we know that insects must have lived long before we have evidence of their existence. The absence of insect fossils earlier than the Carboniferous is hard to explain, because for millions of years the remains of other animais and plants had

FtG. 57- Machilis, a modern representative of ancient insects before the development of wings. ¢Length of body s inch)

been preserved, and have since been round in compara- tive abundance. As a consequence, we have no concrete knowledge of insects before they became winged creatures evo]ved almost to their modern form. At the present time there are wingless insects. Some of them show clearly that they are recent descendants from winged forms." Others suggest by their structure that their ancestors never had wings. Such as these, therefore, may have come down to us by a long line of descent from "the primitive wingless ancestors of all the insects. The common "fish moth," known to entomolo- gists as Lepisma, and its near relation, Machilis (Fig. 57),
 * tre familiar examples of the truly wingless insects of the

present time, and if their remote ancestors were as fragile and as easily crushed as they, we may see a reason why they never lft their impressions in the rocks. Along with the Carboniferous roaches and the Paleo- dictyoptera, there lived a few other kinds of insects, many of which are representative of certain modern

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INSECTS

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