Some species grew to gigantic proportions: 300-million-year-old insects called griffinflies had wingspans that stretched over two feet. “Having wings allows you to open your niche space,” Ware ...

Discover interesting facts about insects, the critters whose combined weight on the planet is 70 times that of all humans.

Different insects flap their wings in different manners. Understanding the variations between these modes of flight may help scientists design better and more efficient flying robots in the future.

See All Key Ideas Swatting a mosquito is a frustrating task as it buzzes away, its wings carrying it faster than seems physically possible. Amidst the vast animal kingdom, insects have evolved and ...

A handful of new studies moves the needle toward a consensus on the long-disputed question of whether insect wings evolved from legs or from the body wall, but the devil is in the details. Jef Akst ...

How did insect wings originate? This is a question that represents an unsolved mystery of insect evolution. Despite many years of research, it is still not entirely clear from which body structure ...

There are many aspects of insect biology, especially their flight, that remain a mystery for scientists. One is simply how they move their wings. The insect wing hinge is a specialized joint that ...

The research appears today in Science Robotics. Prior versions of the robotic insect were composed of four identical units, each with two wings, combined into a rectangular device about the size ...

And seeing that our understanding of other insects' flight abilities continues to grow — check out what butterfly wings look like under a microscope for a truly astonishing sight — the future ...