Insect Fossils

Insect Fossils
For Sale

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Visit these fossil dealer shops currently stocking insect fossils:

EDCOPE Enterprises

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About Insect Fossils

Modern insects are among the most diverse of animals, with more than million species described and represent more than half of all known eukaryotic organisms. The actual number of extant species is estimated at between six and ten million, and occupy essentially all terrestrial Insects, and have even adapted to multiple environmental niches during their complex developmental life cycles.

Fossilization of insects is relatively rare event, normally needing anoxic conditions (without oxygen and lacking aerobic bacteria) such as occur in silty lake bottoms. Exquisite insect fossils are particularly known from Lagerstätte sites such as the Eocene Green River formation and Carboniferous Mazon Creek in the US, the Cretaceous Liaoning Province in China and Crato Formation of Brazil, and the Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone of Germany. Like other Arthropods, insects have an external skeleton called an exoskeleton, but it is thin and composed of chitin, along with a tough protein that poorly fossilizes.

Class Insecta has nonetheless left a prodigious insect fossil record owing to their tremendous reproduction rate. Their fecundity is a powerful evolutionary mediator, fostering rapid adaptation and survival during those geological periods of rapid change known as extinction events.

The oldest insect fossil is Rhyniognatha from the Rhynie Chert of Scotland that is estimated to be some 400 million years old. Because it already had mandibles, a prominent characteristic of winged insects, it has been inferred that first insects likely appeared much earlier during the Silurian.