A century-old microfossil could move the origin of flying insects 80 million years later

Rhyniognatha hirsti was found in 1926 as a head fragment under one millimetre long and was reclassified in 2004 as a roughly 410-million-year-old winged insect because of its jaws. A Natural History Museum team digitally sectioned it with laser confocal microscopy and found the joints insufficient to establish either insect or centipede identity. Removing it from evolutionary dating until confirmed could shift the common ancestor of flying insects about 80 million years later.