Insects take to the air
The first powered flight in the history of life, 150 million years before anything else manages it.
- When
- Known to
- ± 10 million years
- Era
- Carboniferous, Paleozoic
Winged insects appear in the Carboniferous and diversify rapidly, becoming the first organisms to fly under their own power. Flight opens access to plants, escape from predators and dispersal across barriers, and it precedes flight in vertebrates by roughly 150 million years. How wings originated — from gills, from body-wall flaps, or from limb branches — is still argued.