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.
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