Chosha praecursor: a new Carboniferous bristletail

Tihelka E et al 2026 redescribed
Carboniferous Chosha praecursor (Fig 1), an ‘amphibious’ bristletail with small, weak legs and large pleopods. The publicity focuses on the large number of limbs and the sea-to-shore transition.

Bristletails feed on algae, lichens, mosses, and decaying organic detritus.

As noted back in 2022
(Fig 1) insects are derived from crustaceans. Bristletails are wingless transitional taxa.

The authors focused on the 24 ‘limbs’ of Chosha.
Bristletails and caterpillars (Fig 1) also have more than six limbs, aka pleopods.

From the publicity
“School children are taught a basic fact about insects: They have six legs. But hundreds of millions of years ago when these creatures first evolved, some had many more. That’s the conclusion a team of paleontologists reached after re-examining four enigmatic fossils found in Illinois, Texas, and Scotland. The finds, reported today in Nature, suggest many-legged critters represent missing links between modern winged insects and their predecessors, the researchers say.”

Paleontologists are responsible for a long list of false traditions and myths.

“The work “very significantly changes our ideas” about the origin of insects, says David Grimaldi, a paleontologist and entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work.”

More bombast, sadly a product of the modern age of PR.

The lead author said,
“Insects are the most successful and diverse land animals, with millions of species belonging to their ranks. “But we know almost nothing about where they came from,” says Erik Tihelka, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge. Their ancestors were seagoing crustaceans such as shrimp and krill. But what crawled onto land was a mystery because there are so few fossils of early insects.”

No mystery here for the last 4 years.
No mystery in the academic world of insects for decades longer.
So few fossils: Only one Devonian bristletail was needed.

“Tihelka and his colleagues realized
the critter was part insect, part crustacean. “It had a three-part midsection with three pairs of walking legs, and a rear end with 11 segments, a long tail filament, and an egg-laying tube. There was also one pair of unbranched antennae. Collectively, those traits are associated with things you’d see in modern-day insects, not crustaceans. But it also had multiple pairs of legs on its rear end, a decidedly crustacean trait.”

Take another look at the bristletail (Fig 1) and the moth caterpillar.

References
Tihelka E et al (4 co-authors) 2026. Amphibious stem-insect sheds light on colonization of land. Nature. Nature Publishing Group: 1–8. doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10961-2

wiki/Evolution_of_insects
wiki/Archaeognatha
wiki/Hexapoda

Pubicity
scitechdaily.com/how-insects-conquered-land-was-stranger-than-scientists-thought

science.org/content/article/first-insects-had-way-more-six-legs

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2026/09/02/chosha-praecursor-a-new-carboniferous-bristletail/