Insects are famous for their six-legged body plan, but that wasn’t always the rule. A 324-million-year-old fossil dug up from a shale bed in West Texas had a markedly different setup, sporting a whopping 18 extra legs along its belly — a body plan unlike that of any living insect.
It is one of the oddest insects ever found, and possibly the most consequential, researchers report August 26 in Nature .
The discovery “straddles a big gap in the fossil record,” says paleoentomologist Erik Tihelka of the University of Cambridge. It offers a glimpse of the transition from many-legged, shrimplike ancestors to the six-legged insects of today. “It…
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