me in the I'm Eric Eagle Senior Librarian of the Eagle Eyed Explorer Club Years ago the club recruited me as one of its special agents code mare Agent Eagle Most days you'll find basement of the library organizing the atlases But I always keep my rucksack at the ready in case the club needs me for one of its urgent missions I never know when to expect a call STAFF ROOM 2 3 6 1 2 3 4 5 11 10 9 8 7 6 LIBRARY BUGS mission Checklist 1x Explorer Field Notebook 1x magnifying Glass 1x binoculars 1x agent issue Flashlight 1x Portable Time Machine 1x Sandwich hams and cheese 15 12 My latest mission is not only top secret but very dangerous so keep it hush hush The club has ordered me to file a report on the entire history of bugs as soon as possible It looks like i'll need to go back millions of years in time
explorer EXPLORATIONS BUGS ON EARTH HAPPENED I'll need to fill out a Journal to keep track of my discoveries I'm also drawing up a Timeline to show the life story of bugs from the ancient seas to the present day No time to waste Are you feeling brave Let's go
OPABINIA 1 WHAT IS A BUG Way way back in time before the dinosaurs before the woolly mammoths long before human beings some ancient forms of life were swimming through the oceans that covered planet Earth Five hundred and forty million years ago these creatures began to change rapidly into new and different forms in an evolutionary explosion that altered life on Earth entirely Their descendants still exist all over the world today in every continent and every country in every crevice and every corner creatures we call bugs On the Origin of Bug Species In the Cambrian period 540 million years ago the ancestors of today’s bugs were spread out through the oceans where seaweed streamed in the currents and green blobs of algae slopped around in the waves Sea sponges clung to the rocks in the shallows Trilobites swam through the seas in their thousands their compact bodies helping them survive These creatures were early types of arthropod a group of bugs that includes many species today Scientists call this time the Cambrian Explosion as countless numbers of creatures evolved all at once and continued to flourish in the following Ordovician period too Opabinia was a five eyed prong headed predator that hunted through coral reefs for ancient fish like species to eat gobbling up its prey on the seafloor Ramphoprion had a strange angular body but is a distant relative of the modern earthworm 6 1/2 foot long Aegirocassis swam with its jaws wide open scooping tiny marine organisms into its mouth Explorers first thought the spikes on Hallucigenia’s back were its legs although they were mystified as to how this underwater creature could move on such pointy sticks The mystery was cleared up when scientists pointed out that it had been reconstructed upside down Oops 6 Hallucigenia wrong way up eagle eyed library No 02
EXPLORER NOTES Timeline of bug evolution ARTHROPODS Turn the page to discover more about different types of arthropod That’s classified The specifics To get to grips with all this diversity scientists use a careful system of classification that helps them know exactly what’s what or at least what goes where They put the vast majority of the animals that we call bugs into a group of hard shelled creatures called arthropods Arthropods are recognizable by their many jointed limbs as well as the hard exoskeletons that encase their segmented bodies But even though all the arthropod species can be classed under this one label the diversity that exploded in the Cambrian seas continued and the numbers of different arthropod species that exist today go into the millions Of all the different animal species currently living on planet Earth an unbelievable 85 percent are arthropods Insects such as ants arachnids such as spiders myriapods such as centipedes and crustaceans such as pill bugs are all arthropods just as much as their underwater Cambrian ancestors Not only are the arthropods the largest group of bugs alive today they are the largest group of animals alive today period To make sense of all this difference scientists divide larger groups like the arthropods into smaller subgroups The Apocrita are a subgroup which includes ants bees and wasps But not all ants bees and wasps are the same so scientists have to divide these subgroups further still into different species The common honeybee has the species name Apis mellifera Apis tells us that it belongs to the subgroup of hive bees while mellifera Greek for honey bringer tells us precisely what species this specimen might bee Time approx CRUSTACEANS MYRIAPODS ARACHNIDS INSECTS WORMS 520 mya 500 mya 450 mya 430 mya 415 MYA 7
