MONSTROUS insects??????

[MrMistery]

I think mithril's idea is probably the truth and i also think i am an imbecil... It's body did not have to be rounf... how come i didn't think of that...

[James]

Even the best make mistakes...

[MrMistery]

What are you reffering to? The link you gave is good

[MrMistery]

By the way, i recently found out why insects were bigger then: The atmosphere was richer in oxygen, so it could diffuse farther...

[Super Grendel]

The biggest bugs have gotten was around 6 feet (scorpions) and that was hundreds of millions of years before the dinosours, they shrank due to a lessening of oxygen when many trees died.

[doctor phil]

i think i was watching tv and the giant centrepede on it and i also saw a giant spider that was the size of a human

remember, this was in the time BEFORE dinosours so everything was ten times bigger and more effecient than the insects we have now.

[Linn]

I dont know
but there are giant and I mean GIANT earthworms.

[catfishjim]

It's kinda big if you think about it 72cm is about 3feet or the length of a dog.

How big?[/quote]

[AstusAleator]

I know of some invertebrates that have specific open-air vents that passively deliver oxygen to those hard-to-reach places. It's possible that ancestral large insects had these?

[Darby]

The exoskeleton issue definitely limits size - when your skeleton covers your surface, increasing size becomes a major weight problem.

But the oxygen thing is silly - most insect tracheal systems are at least as efficient as vertebrate systems. The diffusion of gases is passive (it is in vertebrates, too), but the system tends to be pumped by skeletal muscles, so exchange is efficient. You can watch a bee breathe. If the system weren't highly efficient, fibrillar muscle (the most energy/oxygen -consuming muscle there is) wouldn't work very well, and flies wouldn't fly.

This may not be as true for the more-primitive Carboniferous insects, though. I suspect that the "oxygen levels" hypothesis is too simplistic, though.