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nese publications). In fact, insects are 

 more cJiverse than that other famous ter- 

 restrial group, for which no one has ever 

 been shy about offering conclusions — the 

 tetrapods, or terrestrial vertebrates (am- 

 phibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals 

 combined). The fossil record of insects in- 

 cludes 1,263 families, that of tetrapods, 

 825 families. Moreover, except for the lat- 

 est Devonian, when insects were young 

 and hadn't yet taken off on an evolutionary 

 radiation, insect diversity has always ex- 

 ceeded tetrapod diversity in every geolog- 

 ical epoch. 



Looking at the taxonomic level of insect 

 families, Labandeira and Sepkoski could 

 find no evidence for any positive impact of 

 the angiosperm radiation upon insect di- 

 versity. The insect radiation began in the 

 early Carboniferous, some 325 million 

 years ago, got derailed once in the greatest 

 of all mass extinctions at the end of the 

 Permian (when eight of twenty-seven in- 

 sect orders died), began again in the sub- 

 sequent Triassic period, and has never 

 stopped since. In fact, and if anything, in- 

 crease in number of families actually 

 seems to slow down somewhat during the 

 Cretaceous as the angiosperms flowered! 



Labandeira and Sepkoski then tried a 

 different approach and also found no rela- 



tionship with angiosperms. Instead of tax- 

 onomic diversity, they tabulated ecologi- 

 cal variety by dividing insects into thirty- 

 four "mouthpart" categories — that is, 

 different ways of making an ecological Uv- 

 ing based on modes of feeding. (Many of 

 these categories include insects from sev- 

 eral different taxonomic lineages, so my 

 colleagues are measuring ecological dis- 

 parity, not just numerical abundance.) 

 They found that 65 to 88 percent of these 

 categories were already filled by the mid- 

 dle Jurassic, the period before an- 

 giosperms arose. Only one to seven new 

 categories arose after the angiosperms 

 evolved, but most of these have especially 

 poor fossil records, and may well have 

 originated earlier. Of these, only one cate- 

 gory is plausibly linked to life with flower- 

 ing plants. Thus, angiosperms are also not 

 responsible for the morphological variety 

 of insect feeding mechanisms. 



Again, the news wires buzzed (more 

 punning apologies) with this story, and the 

 New York Times again awarded front-page 

 billing. Again, expressions of profound 

 surprise were the order of the day. Insects 

 evolved independently of the flowering 

 plants to which many are now so strongly 

 tied? How can this be? Doesn't Darwinism 

 proclaim that organisms change within 





-7} "y 



"Ron, you should have the doctor reset your biological clock." 



20 Natural History 2/94 



