or millipedes—insects have three pairs of jointed legs, segmented bodies, an exoskeleton, one pair of antennae, and (usually) one or two pairs of wings. Insects live in nearly every habitat ...

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 ...

Insect body parts have names a lot like ours — the head, thorax (chest), and abdomen. But insects are also very different from us in many ways, including: They have a hard outer skeleton, instead of ...

The wasps, which lived almost 99 million years ago, might have launched backward at their insect targets, then grasped them within their Venus flytrap-like abdomens. “It’s unlike anything I’ ...

Birds struggle to find good places to nest, yet insects evolved the ability to make anything—wood, leaves, dirt, water, even bodies (especially bodies)—a nursery. If there is a single feature ...

An ancient wasp may have zipped among the dinosaurs, with a body like a Venus flytrap to seize and snatch its prey, ...