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# Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-sleduiushchii-raz-prezhde-chem-ubivat-doma-sorokonozhku-vspomnite-chto-eio-predki-vyshli-na-sushu-na-80-millionov-let-ranshe-pozvonochnykh/
- Published: 2026-06-17T11:23:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:49.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Science, Palaeontology, Nature, Humour

Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates. The first myriapods appeared some 460 million years ago. That is 35 million years earlier than the oldest known myriapod fossils. In the world onto which they crawled, or rather scuttled, there were as yet no vertebrates, no trees, no leaves, no flowering plants and no seed plants. The myriapods fed on decaying mosses and on the primordial organic slime on the surface of the Earth