A weird new species of ancient predatory cockroach has been discovered preserved in amber. 
 
 The cockroach is thought to have lived 100 million years ago, and it looks little like its modern relatives. 
 
 After the first look I knew it was something new 
 
 The tiny monster, measuring just under 1 cm, hosts a weird amalgam of unique features making it look like a chimera of a crane fly, a praying mantis and a cockroach. 
 
 The discovery adds to the number of ferocious cockroaches known to have lived in prehistoric times. 
 
 The new specimen Manipulator modificaputis belongs to an ancient family of cockroaches, called the Manipulatoridae. 
 
 It has a triangular, manoeuvrable head, with large eyes, set upon a long neck, features that likely helped it hunt its prey. The cockroach also had a narrow body and wings, elongated legs and mouthparts, and an extra set of modified eyes located on the top of its head, which likely helped it spot predators, such as the feathered dinosaurs living at the time. 
 
 This little monster was a solitary hunter 
 
 The cockroach was found preserved in amber by German researcher Ziggi Ellenberger in modern day Myanmar. 
 
 At first, scientists thought the cockroach might have been a mantis. 
 
 But an examination by Dr Peter Vršanský, from the Geological Institute of Bratislava and the Slovak Academy of Sciences revealed it to be something different. “After the first look I knew it was something new,” he told BBC Earth. “Nothing similar runs on Earth today.” 
 
 Vršanský made the discovery, reported in the journal Geologica Carpathica along with Günter Bechly, from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. 
 
 They believe the cockroach hunted at night. 
 
 “This little monster was a solitary hunter, able to run very fast, with a body unlike the vast majority of cockroaches living today, it posed high above ground, frequently taking flight when necessary, and seizing its prey with strong short spines developed on its extremely long feet,” he adds. 
 
 Not all scientists agree on the cockroach’s hunting skills though. Manipulator had long and weak legs, and was unlikely to run fast, says Dr Alexandr Rasnitsyn, a professor from the Palaeontological Institute, at the Russian Academy of Sciences. 
 
 He thinks it was more likely to surprise rather than chase its prey, using its long limbs to traverse gaps between forest leaves. 
 
 The new discovery in among a number of ancient cockroaches found in Myanmar. 
 
 Many were predatory insects that evolved to rule the night. “Especially drastic and brutal were top predatory Raphidiomimidae. Cockroaches with a wingspan up to 20cm and eyes divided into two parts, with gut containing large pieces of demolished insects,” says Vršanský. 
 
 Most of these ferocious lineages went extinct, however, with only one lineage surviving today: the praying mantis, which belongs to the same superorder of the cockroaches. ||||| Flies like houseflies that often buzz around homes belong to the order Diptera, which has a family tree that goes back 243 million years ago. The most recent common ancestor for modern flies lived about 158 million years ago, according to the study. There is little doubt that the earliest humans, and their primate predecessors, had to contend with pesky flies and all of the other insects mentioned on this list. All of these organisms are extremely hardy. The researchers determined that, in the history of our planet, there has only been one mass extinction event that had much impact on insects. It occurred 252 million years ago (the Permian mass extinction), and even it set the stage for the emergence of flies, cockroaches, termites and numerous other creepy crawlies. That Beer Smell? Designed to Attract Flies 
 
 Termites and cockroaches have a tightly interwoven family history. Termites similar to the ones we know today were around 138 million years ago. Now we often think of termites as pests, but they are good eats for many different animals, which back in the day would have included our primate ancestors. 
 
 Dinosaur Era fossils sometimes include what researchers call "roachoids," or wing impressions that were made by ancestors to today's roaches, mantids (like the praying mantis) and termites. "Some cockroaches are actually more closely related to termites than they are to other cockroaches," Kjer said, explaining that this makes tracing back their lineages somewhat confusing. He and his colleagues determined that the stem lineage goes back about 230 million years, while the earliest actual cockroach first emerged around 170 million years ago. Cockroaches: The Ultimate Survivors 
 
 Crickets, katydids and grasshoppers had a common ancestor that lived just over 200 million years ago, and a stem lineage that goes back even further to 248 million years ago. A trivia question might be: Which came first, these insects or grass? The insects predate the grass that they now often thrive in. Nightmarish Cricket That Eats Anything Is Now Invading the US 
 
 "Parasitic lice are interesting, because they probably needed either feathers or fur," Kjer said. As a result, they are the relative newbies to this list. Nonetheless, the researchers believe it is possible that ancestors of today's lice were around 120 million years ago, possibly living off of dinosaurs and other creatures then. 10 Worst Epidemics 
 
 Dragonflies and damselflies have family histories that go back about 406 million years. Kjer said that such insects looked differently then, however. "For example," he said, "they had visible antennae." Their distant ancestors were among the first animals on earth to fly. Dragonfly Drone Takes Flight 
 
 "This is an early insect that evolved before insects had wings," Kjer said. Its ancestry goes back about 420 million years. The common ancestor of silverfish living today first emerged about 250 million years ago. Dinosaurs and the earliest mammals likely would have then seen silverfish very similar to the ones that are alive now. Photos: Faces of Bees, Flies and Friends 
 
 Millipedes, such as the one shown here, as well as centipedes are known as myriapods. The most recent common ancestor of myriapods and crustaceans lived about 550 million years ago. Again, this "mother of many bugs" would have been a marine dweller. Kjer explained, "You can't really expect anything to live on land without plants, and plants and insects colonized land at about the same time, around 480 million years ago. So any date before that is a sea creature." Moving forward in time, the most common ancestor of millipedes and centipedes existed a little over 400 million years ago. The leggy body plan has proven to be extremely successful. Leggiest Animal Thrives Near Silicon Valley 
 
 Spiders such as the huntsman spider can, like mites, trace their lineages back to about 570 million years ago, according to the new study. The researchers believe that the common ancestor of mites, spiders and insects was a water-dweller. Photos: Giant Spiders to Freak You Out 
 
 Insects and other creepy crawlies may be tiny, but their lineages are mighty, finds a new study that determined the common ancestor of mites and insects existed about 570 million years ago. The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, presents an evolutionary timeline that settles many longstanding uncertainties about insects and related species. It found that true insects first emerged about 479 million years ago, long before dinosaurs first walked the Earth. Co-author Karl Kjer, a Rutgers entomologist, explained that mites are arthropods, a group that's distantly related to insects. Spiders and crustaceans are also arthropods. 50-Million-Year-Old Mite Chomps Into Ant's Head 
 
 The dragonfly Pantala flavescens, which has just broken the record for long-distance insect flight. 
 
 It may only be an inch and a half long, but the dragonfly Pantala flavescens has just broken the world record for long distance insect flight, according to new research. 
 
 The dragonfly’s estimated range is greater than 4,400 miles, which shatters the prior record set by the monarch butterfly, which flies about 2,500 miles each way during its migration across North America, the authors write. 
 
 The length of the dragonfly’s journeys even exceed the distance of Charles Lindbergh’s celebrated solo flight from New York to Paris by at least several hundred miles, according to the study, which is published in the journal PLOS ONE. 
 
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 The research itself has set a record, becoming the first to use DNA to study how far this species of dragonfly — commonly known as the globe skimmer or wandering glider — can travel. 
 
 “This is the first time anyone has looked at genes to see how far these insects have traveled,” senior author Jessica Ware, an assistant professor of biology at Rutgers University-Newark, confirmed in a press release. 
 
 She added, “If North American Pantala only bred with North American Pantala, and Japanese Pantala only bred with Japanese Pantala, we would expect to see that in genetic results that differed from each other. Because we don’t see that, it suggests the mixing of genes across vast geographic expanses.” 
 
 Video: 5 Incredible Insect Superpowers 
 
 Ware and her team determined that populations of the dragonfly from Texas, eastern Canada, Japan, Korea, India, and South America have nearly identical genetic profiles. This connection has only one likely explanation, according to the researchers: The dragonflies are traveling very long distances, breeding at their destination sites and are creating a common worldwide gene pool. 
 
 The dragonfly’s size makes the travel all the more surprising, as usually only relatively large animals are able to carry enough “fuel” to energize such lengthy trips. Godwits (birds) can carry fat within their bodies that helps them to fly over 7,000 miles non-stop, for example. Blubber-packed humpback whales have been documented as swimming over 6,000 miles. 
 
 For the dragonfly, their travels skills are more about their body’s sleek design and their flying technique. 
 
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 “These dragonflies have adaptations such as increased surface areas on their wings that enable them to use the wind to carry them,” Ware explained. “They stroke, stroke, stroke and then glide for long periods, expending minimal amounts of energy as they do so.” 
 
 As for why they go to all the trouble to travel so much, co-author Daniel Troast said that the dragonfly is “following the weather.” 
 
 One example is that “they’re going from India where it’s dry season to Africa where it’s moist season, and apparently they do it once a year,” he said. 
 
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 He explained that dragonflies require fresh rainwater for their reproduction process. They mate and lay their eggs in freshwater pools created by rainstorms. They will even dive earthward, mid flight, to reach such ephemeral pools. 
 
 Once the eggs hatch and the babies are mature enough to fly after a period of just a few weeks, the young dragonflies join the swarm’s intercontinental and now multi-generational trek at the point where their parents left off. 
 
 Not all species of dragonflies are such impressive high fliers. A cousin of Pantala, the green darner (Anax junius), is the ultimate homebody. 
 
 Ware explained that green darners “don’t ever leave the pond on which they’re born — traveling barely 36 feet away their entire lives.” ||||| Paleontologists working in Morocco have found a fossil of a bizarre sea creature that could grow up to seven feet in length and gathered plankton like a whale. 
 
 The newly discovered animal, dubbed Aegirocassis benmoulae, is an early member of the arthropod family tree, making it an ancient ancestor of cockroaches, butterflies and shrimp. It lived about 480 million years ago in a shallow sea that once covered part of the Sahara Desert. 
 
 "It is one of the biggest arthropods that ever existed, far bigger than any arthropod today," said Peter Van Roy, a paleobiologist at Yale University who helped uncover some of specimens of the extinct animal. 
 
 A paper describing this strange early arthropod was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. 
 
 Aegirocassis benmoulae is part of an extinct group of animals known as anomalocaridid, which were already known to be the largest animals of the Cambrian time period 543 million to 490 million years ago. Aegirocassis is the most recent of these animals to be found and more than double the size of the biggest of its older known relatives. 
 
 It lived during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, about 10 million years after the Cambrian period came to a close. 
 
 All of the anamolocardids were flat-bodied water dwellers, and all of them had two appendages in the front of their mouths. These structures were mostly used to grasp prey like worms and mollusks. However, Aegirocassis modified these appendages, creating an elaborate netlike structure of spikes that allowed it to catch the rapidly diversifying plankton found in the water column at the time. 
 
 Despite its large size, Aegirocassis appears to have been fairly common, Van Roy said. He and the Moroccan fossil collector Mohamed Ben Moula, who first discovered these large animals, have found dozens of preserved specimens in the Moroccan desert. 
 
 "They may have come together to molt, or they may have lived in a group," he said. "It is interesting we found so many of them. It shows there was a well developed, rich plankton system in place 480 million years ago." 
 
 Arthropods first showed up in the fossil record about 530 million years ago, and today the phylum consists of the most morphologically diverse group of animals on the planet. 
 
 However, early fossils of arthropods are hard to come by, which made this particular find so exciting. 
 
 Most fossils are the remains of the hard parts of organisms, like shells and bone, because soft tissues decay so rapidly after death, explained John Paterson, an associate professor at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, who was not involved in the study. 
 
 "However, these extraordinary fossils are soft-bodied, which are typically very rare," he said. "They require rapid burial and low oxygen conditions in order to be preserved in such exquisite detail." 
 
 According to Van Roy, giant storms occasionally caused large mud flows to wash into the ancient sea, smothering everything at the bottom and making it inaccessible for scavengers. 
 
 "If you have the right sediments and they react with the right decay products, then you can basically turn soft tissues to stone," he said. "But a very specific set of criteria must be met, so sites like this are extremely rare." 
 
 The fossils were so well preserved that they allowed researchers to see a previously hidden feature on the body of these early arthropods, helping them to solve a longstanding evolutionary mystery. 
 
 The success of arthropods is associated with the way they are constructed. Their bodies and legs are made of multiple segments that can be be modified for a variety of purposes, allowing them to adapt to a wide range of environments. 
 
 "Morphologically, they are incredibly plastic," Van Roy said. 
 
 Today, the legs of most arthropods have two branches, but researchers were not sure how these double-branched limbs had evolved over time. 
 
 Paleontologists thought they could trace the origins of this double-branched limb to an arthropod ancestor from the early Cambrian. This ancient animal had a set of flaps that ran down the top side of its body for swimming, representing an upper limb, and a set of legs on its belly side, for walking. 
 
 And yet, previous studies of anamolocardids, a later arthropod, had found just one set of flaps on the lower side of the body. This led researchers to wonder where the upper limb had gone. 
 
 The new fossils described in the Nature paper suggest that the second limb did not go anywhere. They show that anamolocardids did have a second set of swimming flaps on the back side of their segments, but they have only been preserved in these particularly complete fossils. 
 
 "These flaps represent the precursors of more modern-style (two-branched) limbs that we see in other arthropods," Paterson said via email. 
 
 Van Roy said there were still many more fossils to go through from the Moroccan site. 
 
 "We have something like 5,000 or 6,000 specimens, most of them unstudied," he said. 
 
 Among the other animals they found are more advanced arthropods, a variety of horseshoe crabs, some which look remarkably like modern-day horseshoe crabs, jellyfish relatives, and early starfish and snails. 
 
 "There are a lot of really exciting things coming," he said. 
 
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– A mean-looking cockroach that lived alongside the dinosaurs had a long neck, swiveling head, and elongated legs that enabled it to surprise prey, New Scientist reports via Gizmodo. Found embedded in amber in Myanmar, the 100-million-year-old insect resembles a cross between a roach, a crane fly, and a praying mantis: "After the first look I knew it was something new," Slovak scientist Peter Vršanský tells the BBC. "Nothing similar runs on Earth today." Vršanský and German colleague Günter Bechly, who revealed the appetizing bug together in the journal Geologica Carpathica, say it likely hunted at night. "This little monster was a solitary hunter, able to run very fast, with a body unlike the vast majority of cockroaches living today," explains Vršanský. It "frequently" took flight and grabbed prey "with strong short spines developed on its extremely long feet," he adds. Called Manipulator modificaputis, it also had an extra set of eyes on top of its head, probably to spot predators like feathered dinosaurs. On the stomach-settling side, it measured less than half an inch long. So it's not as scary as other insect predators back then, like the Raphidiomimidae—which were "especially drastic and brutal," Vršanský says. They were bug-eating roaches "with a wingspan up to 20cm [nearly 8 inches] and eyes divided into two parts." But compare that to Aegirocassis benmoulae, a 7-foot "bizarre sea creature" 480 million years ago that is an ancient cockroach relative and caught plankton like a whale, the LA Times reports. (Or read about an ancient, fearsome sea creature with "curved teeth the size of bananas.")