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Article: Dinosaur dragonflies.(Animal Angles)(Carboniferous dragonfly)
- Article from:
- The Evening Standard (London, England)
- Article date:
- April 1, 2009
- Author:
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Dragonflies the size of seagulls! Egads! Hope it doesn't land on me. Rest easy, these mammoth bugs with wingspans about as wide as two computer screens no longer are whizzing and hovering about. They lived long ago, in the Carboniferous Period (359 million to 299 million years ago).
Scientifically speaking, these bugs were not true dragonflies. "But they have common ancestors with dragonflies," explains Alexander Kaiser, a biochemistry professor at Midwestern University, Glendale, Arizona. Carboniferous "dragonflies" are called griffenflies and are of the order Protodonata.
Why were these bugs so big back then? According ...