This succinct but vivid history of the planet is told from the perspective of insects, which have dominated the terrestrial environment for millions of years. It is a humbling perspective, one that puts us well and truly in our place – principally as the destroyers of a natural environment that insects have been helping to preserve long before our ancestors crawled out of the primal slime. Insects evolved 420m years ago. The first were scavengers, such as silverfish, which colonised shorelines. Flying insects evolved 75m years later, mastering the skies more than 150m years before any other creature. Prehistoric forests swarmed with insects. Shaw, who has spent 50 years studying wasps, notes with considerable schadenfreude that “stinging insects made the dinosaurs’ final years really miserable”. Today there may be as many as 50 million insect species, but they are being destroyed at a rate of one or two an hour, a “massive extinction event” caused by one species: Homo sapiens. Shaw writes with a contagious enthusiasm and is an excellent guide to the history of our buggy planet.
