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Insects are arthropods: invertebrate animals with exoskeletons and segmented bodies.

Arthropods were among the earliest animals to come about, evolving in the ocean between 500-600 million years ago, during the Cambrian period. Selective pressures caused previously soft-bodied animals to develop a hard outer shell to protect them from predators and the harsh marine environment. Arthropods became one of the dominant sea creatures of the time, and many became super-predators that hunted our ancestors, the fish.

Eventually arthropods made the transition from the sea to the land, and that's when the first insects came about (most arthropods previously had more than six legs). The oldest definitive insect fossil is the Devonian Rhyniognatha hirsti, dated at 396 to 407 millionyears ago, but its mandibles are of a type found only in winged insects, which suggests that the earliest insects appeared in the Silurian period.

The Mazon Creek lagerstätten from the Late Carboniferous, about 300 million years ago, include about 200 species, some gigantic by modern standards, and indicate that insects had occupied their main modern ecological niches as herbivores, detritivores and insectivores. Social termites and ants first appear in the Early Cretaceous, and advanced social bees have been found in Late Cretaceous rocks but did not become abundant until the Mid Cenozoic

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