By S Gray
 |
| Fulgora laternaria
Credit: Andrew McCormick for the California Academy of Sciences
|
The journal Science recently published
the largest ever study on Insect Evolution. The paper involves the
collaboration of 100 scientists from 10 countries studying a
phenomenal 144 species. The study looked at 1478 genes – a large
proportion of the expressed genes across the entire insect genome.
'That amount of data was so enormous
that once we got it, it was too big to analyse: we didn’t have the
computational power to deal with it,' says Michelle Trautwein,
assistant curator and Schlinger Chair of Dipterology at the
California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. New software and
algorithms were developed to analyse the data set and even so the
analysis took months for supercomputers to crunch.
The study confirmed that insects, which
first appeared on earth 500 million years ago, evolved wings around
400 million years ago. This was about the same time that early plants were beginning to gain height and forests began to spread across the
earth. While it can't be determined if one of these events worked as
a catalyst for the other, the correlation between them shows that
their evolutionary history was definitely intertwined.
If you are interested in hearing more
about this study, there is a great interview between Ira Flatow from
PRI's Science Friday and Michelle Trautwein.
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