Now and again an infinitesimal news item appears that puts in perspective the entire scope of human affairs, from the tragic to the trivial. That happened again this month, about the time the world's attention was divided between the Middle East and Mr. Tiger Woods. It turns out that in nature's vast scheme of things, neither of those unstoppable phenomena looms as large as we think. Judged by the cold criteria of numbers or longevity, we humans are small fry indeed.
In mid-April, a team of German and Danish scientists announced the discovery of a new order of insects, the first since 1915. Well, not new, exactly. The spiny, stick-like insect that scientists have nicknamed "gladiator" (after the armored combatants in the Hollywood movie) has been around for at least 45 million years -- the age of the amber-preserved specimen that first piqued the curiosity of a German doctoral student. Not so new, then, but not dead, either: Incredibly, on a recent expedition to Namibia, an international research team found living specimens of the very same insect, more or less the equivalent of finding a live saber-toothed tiger or woolly mammoth.
What is new is the insect's classification. This ancient fellow, previously thought to be a member of the order Orthoptera, like the praying mantis it resembles, proved sufficiently different to form not a separate species, or genus, or even family, but a separate order, dubbed Mantophasmatodea -- comparable, taxonomically speaking, to the ants, bees and wasps (Hymenoptera) or the beetles (Coleoptera). It is as if we had lived all these millennia and never noticed butterflies, one scientist said.