Record-age insect fossil

The Rhynie Chert comes through again. This body of silicified sediment in Scotland, some 400 million years old, is a lagerstatte—a "universal graveyard" where even delicate and microscopic fossils are preserved. A tiny bit of chert, kept in a museum drawer since the 1920s, turns out to contain the oldest known insect, pushing the lineage back tens of millions of years.