Thirty years ago, they came up with an answer known as the “oxygen constrain hypothesis.” For decades, we thought that any dragonflies the size of hawks needed highly oxygenated air to survive because ...

Scientific consensus is that high oxygen levels allowed these humongous fliers to exist, but a new study throws that idea ...

Three-hundred-million years ago, Earth was very different. The continents had coalesced into Pangea, which was dominated in ...

Scientists rethink why giant insects once ruled the skies, finding oxygen may not explain their size or disappearance.

Scientists thought giant dragonflies couldn’t survive in today’s atmosphere – but a study of dozens of insect species shows ...

Mosquitoes are some of the fastest-flying insects. Flapping their wings more than 800 times a second, they achieve their speed because the muscles in their wings can flap faster than their nervous ...

Robots helped achieve a major breakthrough in our understanding of how insect flight evolved. The study is a result of a six-year long collaboration between roboticists and biophysicists. Robots built ...

The structure of fibrillar flight muscle / D.E. Ashhurst and M.J. Cullen -- Extraction, purification, and localization of [alpha]-actinin from asynchronous insect flight muscle / D.E. Goll [and others ...

Learn how ancient oxygen levels in the Paleozoic era were linked to giant insect size, and why that theory is now being ...

Different insects flap their wings in different manners. Understanding the variations between these modes of flight may help scientists design better and more efficient flying robots in the future.

Three hundred million years ago, dragonfly-like creatures with wingspans stretching 70 centimeters patrolled the skies of a world nothing like our own. These griffinflies, as paleontologists call them ...