The New York Times has an interesting article about research that has uncovered an early insect. The animal, Chosha praecursor, lived about 324 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period in what is now Texas. It looked very similar to modern day silverfish, with a huge difference… it had 24 legs! C. praecursor was described in the paper “Amphibious stem-insect sheds light on colonization of land”, which was published in Nature.

Erik Tihelka’s first glimpse of one of the world’s oldest insects came from an outdated Russian textbook that he bought on eBay.

In it, a small line drawing of a fossil, labeled as an early crustacean that had lived 324 million years ago, caught his eye. “The more I looked, the more intrigued I got,” said Mr. Tihelka, a doctoral student in paleontology at Cambridge.

For a fossil described as a crustacean, it seemed to have an awful lot of insectlike traits, such as a body split into three parts, a pair of antennae and six legs emerging from the central part of the body. Overall, it looked a lot like a modern silverfish.