It sounds like a just-so story—“How the Insect Got its Wings”—but it’s really a mystery that has puzzled biologists for over a century. Intriguing and competing theories of insect wing evolution have ...

The image above is an extreme close-up of a common British insect called a planthopper. You’re looking at it from below, at the point where its two hind legs connect to its body. In the middle, you ...

People’s proud invention of gears was preceded by mindless evolution: The tiny points on the legs of juvenile planthopper insects move like intermeshing cogs. Those cogs in young Issus coleoptratus ...

Even though science allows us to peer into galaxies hundreds of millions of miles away and tear atoms apart to look for clues about the origin of the universe, there are still lots of unanswered ...

Gears are ubiquitous in the man-made world, found in items ranging from wristwatches to car engines, but it seems that nature invented them first. A species of plant-hopping insect, Issus coleoptratus ...

The small hopping insect Issus coleoptratus uses toothed gears (magnified above with an electron microscope) to precisely synchronize the kicks of its hind legs as it jumps forward. All images ...

There are about 40 kinds of cats out there – like me. There’s only one kind of human on Earth now. But there are more than a million kinds of insects. That’s just the insect species we know about.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Gears are ubiquitous in the man-made world, found in items ranging from wristwatches to car ...