Three hundred million years ago, dragonfly-like creatures with wingspans stretching 70 centimeters patrolled the skies of a world nothing like our own. These griffinflies, as paleontologists call ...

Three-hundred-million years ago, Earth was very different. The continents had coalesced into Pangea, which was dominated in ...

The problem with diffusion is that it’s notoriously slow. The oxygen constraint hypothesis argued that the larger the insect ...

Scientific consensus is that high oxygen levels allowed these humongous fliers to exist, but a new study throws that idea ...

Scientists rethink why giant insects once ruled the skies, finding oxygen may not explain their size or disappearance.

The structure of fibrillar flight muscle / D.E. Ashhurst and M.J. Cullen -- Extraction, purification, and localization of [alpha]-actinin from asynchronous insect flight muscle / D.E. Goll [and others ...

Learn how ancient oxygen levels in the Paleozoic era were linked to giant insect size, and why that theory is now being ...

About 350 million years ago, our planet witnessed the evolution of the first flying creatures. They are still around, and some of them continue to annoy us with their buzzing. While scientists have ...

Scientists thought giant dragonflies couldn’t survive in today’s atmosphere – but a study of dozens of insect species shows ...

Fossil relatives of dragonflies, known as griffinflies, had wingspans of 70 centimeters (28 inches) 300 million years ago, and they weren’t the era’s only insects that far exceeded their modern ...

When I was little, I loved chasing butterflies. It’s fun to run after them as they flit and flutter. But I didn’t eat them. I asked my friend Rich Zack if that was an oversight. He’s an insect ...