What happened to the giant bugs?
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What is the episode’s opening premise and why are giant Carboniferous insects intriguing?
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Hello, Noam. Hello,
Bird.
I have a question for you. Yeah, hit me. Which is When it comes to pre human times, what would you say is the most exciting pre-human time?
I mean I'm a dinosaur guy.
That is fair. But I would like to make the case, if you'll allow it, for The Carboniferous
instead. Okay. Uh I can Can you remind me what the Carboniferous is and when it is?
Sure. So the age of the dinosaurs is the Mesozoic era. Uh so meso meaning middle. Okay. And then uh the Carboniferous is in the Paleozoic, so the old era. Got it. Um Carboniferous ends around 300 million years ago, so 50 million years before the dinosaurs really kick off. And you can imagine it having uh these huge swampy forests. So flowers haven't evolved yet. Uh there are no flowers, but there are tree-sized ferns. If you've ever seen the plant called Horse Tail, which is this sort of segmented, weird-looking plant, um, there are massive versions of those. Uh there are club mosses, and things are again just very swampy.
Very swampy, okay.
But the thing that I think is really amazing about this pre-dinestore time is that there were giant Bugs.
Okay.
So we have fossils of huge dragonfly like bugs. Uh wait, how
how huge are we talking here?
So we're talking Seventy centimeter wingspan. Gimme
give me inches.
The height of a medium suitcase. Are dragonfly like a carry-on dragonfly? You actually can't carry on a medium suitcase. So its wingspan is bigger than uh a carry-on. Um and they're carnivorous, by the way. So these are flying, carnivorous suitcase-sized dragonflies. Um they're two meter long millipede like bugs. Uh so that's More than six foot, longer than I am tall, millipede type things.
I'm just imagining like My wife yelling from the other room and being like,
You gotta get this millipede, it's huge and I'm like, How big? And she's like,
Two meters. Yeah, it's very hard for me to imagine why this is not as exciting to people as dinosaurs.
It seems scarier. Like they should do Jurassic Park with with Two meter long belipedes.
Begin. A lot of these big bug fossils come from the Carboniferous.
How do the hosts define the Carboniferous period and describe the giant dragonfly‑like and millipede‑like bugs?
That's sort of the the heyday of these guys. And then there are some from the Permian, but by the end of the Permian, the the really giant ones seem to be done so. Mm-hmm. And so No, this is unexplainable and today on the show I wanna ask What happened to them?
What happened to the bugs?
They're really big bugs.
This is this is a big mystery.
This is a bug mystery.
So I actually thought that I knew the answer to this question because I had learned that it basically had to do with oxygen.
Yeah.
So people have kind of debated aspects of this a bit over the decades, but the thought is that in the Carboniferous, in this world full of plants, oxygen levels might have been higher than they are today. So we are at twenty one percent oxygen. They think the Carboniferous is more like thirty to thirty five percent oxygen.
And that's the thing. That allows for the big bugs, like more oxygen means bigger bugs. I do feel like I've heard this like somewhere in the in the back of my mind, like oxygen equals bug size, but I have no idea why.
So I was talking to a few researchers who've sort of looked into this, thought about this, including this guy named Ned Snelling at the University of Pretoria.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the episode’s opening premise and why are giant Carboniferous insects intriguing?
0:01–3:45
2
How do the hosts define the Carboniferous period and describe the giant dragonfly‑like and millipede‑like bugs?
3:45–9:31
3
Why have scientists long linked insect size to atmospheric oxygen levels?
9:31–17:16
4
What does Ned Snelling’s research reveal about insects’ oxygen‑delivery system and its efficiency?
17:16–25:44
5
How do spiracles and tracheae work in insects, and why might they limit body size?
25:44–29:42