ROACHES AND OTHER ANCIENT INSECTS 



It is probable that a visitor to those days of long ago 

 might give us a more complete account of the vegetation 

 that grew in the Carboniferous swamps than can be known 

 from the records of the rocks, but the paleobotanist has 

 a wealth of material now at hand sufficient to give us 

 at least a pretty reliable picture of the setting in which 

 the earliest of known insects lived and died. 



And now, what were the insects like that inhabited 

 the forests of those early times? Were they, too, strangely 

 fashioned creatures, fit denizens of a far-off fairyland? 

 No, nothing of the sort, at least not in appearance or 

 structure, though "fit" they probably were, from a physi- 

 cal standpoint, for insects are fitted to live almost any- 

 where. In short, the Carboniferous insects were prin- 

 cipally roaches! Yes, those woods and swamps of millions 

 of years ago were alive with roaches little different from 

 our own familiar household pests, or from the numerous 

 species that have not forsaken their native habitats for 

 life in the cities. 



Whoever looks to the geological records for evidence 

 of the evolution of insects is sorely disappointed, for 

 even in the venation of the wings those early roaches 

 (Fig. 55) were almost identical with our present species 

 (Fig. 53). As typical examples of the Carboniferous 

 roaches, the species shown in Figure 55 serve well, and 

 anyone can see, even though the specimens lack antennae 

 and legs, that the creatures were just common roaches. 

 Hence, we can easily picture these ancient roaches scut- 

 tling up the tall trunks of the scaly lycopbds, and shuffling 

 in and out among the bases ot the close-set leaf stems 

 of the tree ferns, and we should expect to find an abundant 

 infestation of them in the vegetational refuse matted on 

 the ground. Insects of those days must have been com- 

 paratively free from enemies, for birds did not yet exist, 

 and all that host of parasitic insects that attack other 

 insects were not evolved until more recent times. 



Though by far the greater number of the Carboniferous 



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