Planet of the Bugs Quotes

“Other mother wasps pick up a small stone with their jaws and tamp down the soil over the nest entrance. Thus, wasps were the first stone tool users, probably tens of millions of years before any primate or human ever picked up a rock.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“Pikaia is now regarded as the most likely common ancestor of fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“Oxygen, The Molecule That Made the World.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has advised us to “seek simplicity and distrust it.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“Over the past 120 million years, insects have coevolved and explosively diversified in tandem with the angiosperms—the dominant forms of plant diversity in modern ecosystems. They are essential as pollinators and seed-dispersers for most of the flowering plants, whose communities would be vastly diminished if all plant-associated insects were eliminated.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“Not many organisms totally depend on humans for their continued existence, but a large part of living plants and terrestrial animals depend partly or entirely on insects for their survival.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“plant feeding has a very desirable outcome. It prevents particular plant species from becoming superabundant and weedy, allowing vastly more species to coexist in much smaller spaces. Plant-feeding insects are a driving force in the evolution of plant community species richness, and so the extraordinary plant diversity of tropical habitats is largely due to insect diversity, not despite it.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“Members of one of the griffenfly families—of the tropical family Meganeuridae—are the largest insects that ever lived. During the Permian times, Meganeuropsis permiana developed wingspans of seventy-one centimeters (between two and three feet wide), while most other meganeurid species typically had wings four to thirteen inches long.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“when it comes to animal form, an external skeleton is better.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

“if Cambrian trilobites had become extensively predatory, then it’s exceedingly unlikely that we would be here to piece together this story.”
― Scott Richard Shaw, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects