The evolution of insect flight

This is the first book on this subject since J.W.S. Pringle's classic Insect flight was published in 1957. Much has been written since on applied and ecological aspects of flight, but consideration of the question of the origin of wings and flight has been largely confined to armchair speculation in a scattered literature. To make matters worse, much of the recent empirical work has only appeared in Russian.

Brodsky is a leading Russian authority on insect flight, a pioneer in the use of empirical aerodynamic techniques to unravel the mechanisms which underlie insect flight and hence its origins. By uniting fossil, structural, and phylogenetic information with his empirical studies, he draws a coherent, well-substantiated picture of the evolution of insect flight. The text is illustrated by numerous fine line drawings.