Rhyniella praecursor was an early springtail that lived during the early Devonian, about 410-400 million years ago, in what is now Scotland. Discovered in the exceptionally well-preserved Rhynie chert fossil site, it’s one of the earliest known hexapods.
It was around 2mm long (~0.08″) and closely resembled some of its modern relatives – with distinctive anatomical features like a collophore and a furca – showing that springtails were already well-established in such an early terrestrial ecosystem.
It probably had a similar sort of ecological role to modern springtails, too, being involved in the breaking down of organic matter and the formation of soils.
References:
- Dunlop, Jason A., and Russell J. Garwood. “Terrestrial invertebrates in the Rhynie chert ecosystem.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 373.1739 (2018): 20160493. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0493
- “Collembolans.” University of Aberdeen School of Geosciences, https://www.abdn.ac.uk/geosciences/departments/geology/research/the-rhynie-chert/the-learning-resource-site/fossil-fauna/collembolans/
- Whalley, Paul, and Edmund A. Jarzembowski. “A new assessment of Rhyniella, the earliest known insect, from the Devonian of Rhynie, Scotland.” Nature 291.5813 (1981): 317-317. https://doi.org/10.1038/291317a0
- Wikipedia contributors. “Rhyniella” Wikipedia, 03 Dec. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyniella