The deep evolutionary history of your least favorite barbecue guests

Posted May 14, 2026

As summer approaches, many look forward to camping trips and picnics. Time outdoors means more chances to appreciate the remarkable diversity that evolution has produced – especially those frequent visitors to backyard barbecues: arthropods! This group is made up of insects, arachnids, centipedes, millipedes, crustaceans, and their close relatives, which all share a few key family traits: a hard, armor-like exoskeleton with joints to allow movement and many pairs of jointed legs. This combination of traits appears to have been an evolutionary winner. Arthropods account for more than 80% of all described species. But then, they have also had plenty of time to diversify. Some of our earliest animal fossils, which lived more than 500 million years ago, are arthropods. Recent research on a fossil arthropod closely related to the ancestor of centipedes and millipedes reveals how they crawled onto land – and provides perspective on the diverse forms of arthropod that have lived throughout time and surround us today.

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