The Evolution of Insect Flight

About this book

This is the first book on this subject since JWS Pringle's classic Insect Flight was published in 1957. Much has been written since on applied and ecological aspects of flight, but consideration of the question of the origin of wings and flight has been largely confined to armchair speculation in a scattered literature. To make matters worse, much of the recent empirical work has only appeared in Russian.

The author is a leading Russian authority on insect flight, a pioneer in the use of empirical aerodynamic techniques to unravel mechanisms which underlie insect flight and hence its origins. By uniting fossil, structural, and phylogenetic information with his empirical studies, he draws a coherent, well-substantiated picture of the evolution of insect flight.

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Basic principles of insect flight
1. Structure of the wing apparatus
2. Mode of action of the wing apparatus
3. The aerodynamics of insect flight
4. Flight and behaviour

Part II The evolution of insect flight
5. The origins of flight and wings in insects
6. Early forms of flight
7. Flight based in hindwings
8. From functionally four-winged to functionally two-winged flight
9. Progress in insect flight
10. Looking into the past: the process of evolution, and insect wing apparatus

Postscriptum
References
Index

Customer Reviews