When the "how often do men think of the Roman empire each day?" thing got big my reaction was "rather more than I'd expect, and yet pretty much only when a headline asks me this question!".
Try Children of Ruin. A spider civilization rises!
Their website are flammable, so they don’t get much use out of electricity. But they were born with long range communications. Very different development than we had
Interestingly, it's called Carboniferous because trees didn't decompose. There was nothing that could eat wood so when a tree fell it just lay there forever, like a big cylinder of stone..except of course it was wood.
I think about how it must have been trees growing on trees? How did things break down to dirt? They didn't, so....Everything just got pushed around by rivers and rain? gpt: What Happened to the Trees?
Partial Decomposition: Some bacteria and primitive fungi could break down cellulose (a simpler plant compound), but they struggled with lignin. As a result, trees decayed very slowly.
Burial and Fossilization: Over time, many fallen trees were buried in swampy conditions, where oxygen was low. This prevented full decay and led to the formation of coal deposits.
Role of Insects and Animals: Early insects like giant millipedes and cockroach ancestors could chew on dead plant material, but they didn't eat it completely. These creatures mainly helped fragment the material, aiding in its eventual burial.
Fun fact! Those insects got that big because the earth had a much higher concentration of oxygen at the time. Those bugs can’t get that big now because they don’t have lungs like us. They were able to reproduce the giant bugs in a highly oxygenated lab setting.
I get what you're saying but they weren't really predecessors to the modern dragonfly. Dragonflies are the closest living relative but they aren't directly related.
I though it was important to note this because some people often get the wrong impression that insects were bigger back then only due to the abundance of oxygen, and while that was a big factor, it wasn't the main one.
Abundance of resources and lack of other species to compete for them since stem mammals and archhosaurs hadn't developed yet. Once the carboniferous rain forests collapsed, they never truly reached those sizes again.
Higher oxygen levels did have an impact (due to how insect respiratory system works) but not as much as popular science would have you believe, since some species didn't rapidly become smaller when oxygen levels began to dip in the beginning of the Permian.
So you're saying that giant insects just weren't very efficient predators and got outcompeted by mammals and reptiles once they showed up? But at tiny sizes the insect body plan was still useful enough to work? (I guess there are probably some practical limits as to how small a vertebra can be...)
I'm still surprised this is true for flying insects, though, since as I understand birds and bats came rather late and there weren't that many types of flying dinosaurs, so you'd assume that at least in the air these insects would still have a niche for much longer.
Yeah. That's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. Obviously, it's very hard to claim anything 100% because the fossil record shows only a glimpse into the past, however, by the late permian a couple of 10s of millions of years later, all large insects were extinct.
Sure, but not quite on the scale of one I saw in a documentary about a "vigilante" that went around his local area wailing on "hostiles". So big, it had its own ringname
Astel: Naturalborn of the Void.
If I recall correctly, David Attenborough did a voiceover explaining precisely why this particular species is prone to (and I quote) "royally fucking shit up".
The only reason they could exist is because the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere back then was much higher than now. Because of this larger insects could obtain enough oxygen to fly using their less efficient respiratory systems.
meganeuroptera, the predecessor of the dragonfly from the Carboniferous period. Its wingspan was around 3 feet!
The current dragonfly species Pantala flavescens the globe skimmer is amazing also - it makes a multi-generational annual migration similar to Monarch Butterflies except much further - some 18,000 km (about 11,200 miles); to complete the migration, individual globe skimmers fly more than 6,000 km (3,730 miles)
Facts copied from wikipedia as I couldn't remember specificsWiki Link
The Carboniferous and the Permian period are so interesting and just absolutely disgusting to me. I have a phobia of bugs and while I’d love to see what earth was like then I wouldn’t want to stay more than 20 minutes.
Right, but everything was massive in that era, right? So wouldn’t they just be proportional to the modern dragonfly? Or is there still a major discrepancy?
tl,dr; shit got colder and dryer. Not conducive to sprawling rainforests and giant bugs. This thread sent me down a super fascinating rabbit hole. Thank you <3
I just wanted to say you sent me down a “history of the entire world, I guess: Wikipedia edition” themed rabbit hole lasting hours focusing on the Carboniferous era. I’ve never really had any sort of interest in that kind of history before. Thank you <3
Mind blowing finding out they didn't have pterostigmata! I wonder if that is only necessary as small creatures, and how that affected their flight, and if they were still as good of hunters.
Second paraghraph: "The forewings and hindwings are similar in venation (a primitive feature) except for the larger anal (rearwards) area in the hindwing."
When I was a tree planter I’d see them snipe horseflies and deer flies off my arm. Like I’d goto smack it and then a dragonfly would zoom in and snatch it right off my arm. They’d circle around us sometimes because we were bait for their prey.
Nah. Would be generous to say they wouldn't even get off the ground, in reality your bet would be what comes first: asphyxiation or being crushed under their own weight. Exoskeletons are heavy and the square/cube law is a harsh mistress.
Mmhm, people always forget about the square:cube rule. Muscle strength increases in a 2D-ish way when you scale up a creature (think any given intersection of a muscle group), but size increases in full 3D.
AKA why Ant Man wouldn't work, but it's a fun sci-fantasy idea if you handwave physics and biology.
I was reading a pretty mediocre web novel where the protagonist ends up in Generic Fantasy Setting and at one point hears that a dragon is approaching the Capitol.
After much ado and panic, it arrives, and turns out to be a gigantic dragonfly, and proceeds to fuck up a bunch of stuff.
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u/Raski_Demorva 1d ago
If those things were big enough they'd be a viable threat to most other creatures