Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
q2K BHP
Black History Portal
THE BHP WIRE —
HIDDEN TRUTHS
What's New!
Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Megasecoptera Temporal range:
| |
|---|---|
| |
| Adult of Mischoptera nigra (a) and reconstructions of early (b) and late (c) larvae of Mischoptera douglassi | |
| |
| Restoration of Corydaloides scudderi | |
Scientific classification 
| |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Clade: | Pancrustacea |
| Class: | Insecta |
| Superorder: | †Palaeodictyopterida |
| Order: | †Megasecoptera Brongniart, 1885 |
| Taxa | |
|
See Taxonomy | |
| Synonyms[2] | |
|
Protohymenoptera Tillyard, 1924a | |
Megasecoptera is a Paleozoic insect order. There are 22 known families of megasecopterans, with about 35 known genera.
Like all other paleodictyopteroids, the megasecopterans had sucking mouthparts. The suctorial mouth parts were probably used to pierce plant casings and extract high-quality plant materials, such as spores and pollen.
Unlike some earlier insects, megasecopterans bore two pairs of wings, which were nearly of the same size. The wings probably were held horizontally, as in dragonflies (Odonata, Anisoptera). The wing bases tend to be very slender and petiolated, as in damselflies (Odonata, Zygoptera). The body was usually long and thin, although the genus Protohymen was rather stouter and shorter than a typical megasecopteran. Another distinctive feature was the presence of a number of fine processes projecting from the body, which in some cases could be longer than the body itself, forming long fringes on the insect's underside.[3]
During their relatively brief period of existence, the Megasecoptera were rather successful. It has been estimated that this insect order accounted for 50% of the insect biomass in some locations, but the available evidence might be misleading.[citation needed].
The following taxa are recognized as being included in the order Megasecoptera:[4]
Unattributed to a suborder
Unattributed to a family
| |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
 | This prehistoric insect-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. |
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Megasecoptera is a Paleozoic insect order. There are 22 known families of megasecopterans, with about 35 known genera.
Bechala is a genus of insects that existed during the Late Carboniferous in what is now Germany. It was first described by Jan-Michael Ilger and Carsten Brauckmann in 2012, and the type species is B. sommeri. Its type specimen was a wing (AKH 524) discovered at the Küchenberg quarry, in the Ziegelschiefer Formation. The wing measurements are 39×6 millimetres. Bechala was originally assigned to the extinct order Megasecoptera, but a restudy instead assigned it to the superorder Odonatoptera.
A fly (pl. flies) is an insect of the order Diptera (from Ancient Greek δι- di- 'two' and πτερόν pteron 'wing'), named for the single pair of wings. The hindwings have evolved into halteres, organs that sense rotation, giving flies precise control of their flight. Diptera is a large order containing more than 150,000 species, including horse-flies, crane flies, hoverflies, mosquitoes and others. Flies have a mobile head, with a pair of large compound eyes, and mouthparts designed either for piercing and sucking (in mosquitoes, black flies, and robber flies) or for lapping and sucking (in the other groups). Their wing arrangement gives them great manoeuvrability in flight, and claws and pads on their feet enable them to cling to smooth surfaces. Flies undergo complete metamorphosis; the eggs are often laid on the larval food-source, and the larvae, which lack true limbs, develop in a protected environment, often inside their food source. Other species are ovoviviparous, opportunistically depositing hatched or hatching larvae, instead of eggs, on carrion, dung, decaying material, or open wounds of mammals. Members of superfamily Hippoboscoidea exhibit adenotrophic viviparity, laying advanced pre-pupae on substrates suitable for burrowing and pupation. The pupa is a tough capsule from which the adult emerges when ready to do so; flies mostly have short lives as adults. Diptera is one of the major insect orders and of considerable ecological and human importance. Flies are major pollinators, second only to bees and their Hymenopteran relatives. Flies may have been among the evolutionarily earliest pollinators responsible for early plant pollination. Fruit flies are used as model organisms in research, but less benignly, mosquitoes are vectors for malaria, dengue, West Nile fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, and other infectious diseases; and houseflies, commensal with humans all over the world, spread foodborne illnesses. Flies can be annoyances, especially in some parts of the world where they can occur in large numbers, buzzing and settling on the skin or eyes to bite or seek fluids. Larger flies, such as tsetse flies and screwworms, cause significant economic harm to cattle. Blowfly larvae, known as gentles, and other dipteran larvae, known more generally as maggots, are used as fishing bait, as food for carnivorous animals, and in medicine in debridement, to clean wounds.
Flea, the common name for the order Siphonaptera, includes 2,500 species of small flightless insects that live as external parasites of mammals and birds. Fleas live by ingesting the blood of their hosts. Adult fleas grow to about 3 millimetres (1⁄8 inch) long, are usually dark in color, and have bodies that are "flattened" sideways or narrow, enabling them to move through their hosts' fur or feathers. They lack wings; their hind legs are extremely well adapted for jumping. Their claws keep them from being dislodged, and their mouthparts are adapted for piercing skin and sucking blood. Some species can leap 50 times their body length, a feat second only to jumps made by another group of insects, the superfamily of froghoppers. Flea larvae are worm-like, with no limbs; they have chewing mouthparts and feed on organic debris left on their hosts' skin. Genetic evidence indicates that fleas are a specialised lineage of parasitic scorpionflies (Mecoptera) sensu lato, most closely related to the family Nannochoristidae. The earliest known fleas lived in the Middle Jurassic; modern-looking forms appeared in the Cenozoic. Fleas probably originated on mammals first and expanded their reach to birds. Each species of flea specializes, more or less, on one species of host: many species of flea never breed on any other host; some are less selective. Some families of fleas are exclusive to a single host group; for example, the Malacopsyllidae are found only on armadillos, the Ischnopsyllidae only on bats, and the Chimaeropsyllidae only on elephant shrews. The oriental rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, is a vector of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. The disease was spread to humans by rodents, such as the black rat, which were bitten by infected fleas. Major outbreaks included the Plague of Justinian, about 540, and the Black Death, about 1350, each of which killed a sizeable fraction of the world's people. Fleas appear in human culture in such diverse forms as flea circuses; poems, such as John Donne's erotic "The Flea"; works of music, such as Modest Mussorgsky's "Song of the Flea" (1879); and The Professor, an uncompleted and unreleased 1919 film by Charlie Chaplin.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
