There are roughly 2,200,000 known animal species, and 400,000 of those are just beetles. Entomologists estimate there are 10 quintillion insects on Earth
Makes sense. Insect lifespans are so short that evolution can be much faster. Primates have been around for 65 million years and only have 431 species, a life form with 1/20th the lifespan at best would have to speciate much faster than that.
More likely the small size, flight and the holometabolous lifestyle.
There is the theory that the number of species is related to the number of available niches. For mammals, a tree may offer 2-3 with the ground, the branches and maybe something like burrowing (this is just for illustration purposes).
Insects can live in the leaves, dead branches, inside the wood, in the mosses, on the ground, in the leaf litter layer, burrowing etc., etc. because they are so small. They can also easily transit between different places because most of them can fly.
Because the larvae of holometabolous insects can occupy a completely different niche than the adults, every combination of niches can more or less be considered a new niche.
All of this is reflected in the species richness of insects. The primary wingless groups of insects are not very diverse compared to winged insects. And within the winged insects, the holometabolous species make up the vast majority. Hymenoptera, flies and beetles make up the majority of insects and they are all winged and holometabolous. If you just look at the hemimetabolous ones, they aren’t much more diverse than other groups of arthropods.
“My dear fellow members, today we review the application of Mary Anning to become a member of our distinguished society. As usual, the devil’s advocate will start.”
“Thank you, Sir. Mary Anning! On one hand, she’s a woman, and on the other… No wait, actually I rest my case.”
“Thank you. Now the defense can move forward.”
“No, sorry, she is a woman after all.”
" Big no-no then. Huzzah, tradition prevails! To the smoking room, chaps."
Stromer claimed that the specimen was from the early Cenomanian, about 97 million years ago.[8][6]
It was destroyed in World War II, specifically “during the night of 24/25 April 1944 in a British bombing raid of Munich” that severely damaged the building housing the Paläontologisches Museum München (Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology). However, detailed drawings and descriptions of the specimen remain. Stromer’s son donated Stromer’s archives to the Paläontologische Staatssammlung München in 1995, and Smith and colleagues analysed two photographs of the Spinosaurus holotype specimen BSP 1912 VIII 19 discovered in the archives in 2000.
It wasn’t NASA tho - it was the International Astronomical Union (IAU):
NASA’s New Horizons mission made a close pass of Pluto this week. For more than 70 years, Pluto was one of nine planets recognised in our Solar System.
But in 2006, it was relegated to the status of dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). So why was Pluto demoted?
Not plants and bacteria, many of them can survive off sunlight and minerals broken down from stones, such as lichen. Although I guess lichen is a combination of plants, bacteria and fungi
plants and bacteria would struggle without animals and fungi as well, everything depends on like literally the entire earth’s ecosystems to survive to some degree.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
this is just such a cool thing to think about, there was a time when there were just dead trees everywhere in forests, like just laying there being logs or whatever, just piles and piles of dead trees and that’s where coal comes from.
The people mining and dying and polluting the planet just digging out piles of dead trees.
Sporopollenin, recognized as one of the most chemically resilient biological polymers, forms a crucial component of the robust outer (exine) walls of spores and pollen grains in plants. It’s been found in rock up to 500,000 years old iirc.
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