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Millipedes Beat Vertebrates to Land by 80 Million Years New Study Reveals

A study published in Current Biology on June 12, 2026 by Virginia Tech's Dr. Paul Marek pushes back the origin of land-dwelling millipedes to approximately 460 million years ago in the Ordovician period, 35 million years earlier than previously thought. Millipedes reached land more than 80 million years before vertebrates. The research, which obtained the first-ever DNA sequences from two elusive millipede orders, also reveals that these ancient detritivores helped build the proto-soils that enabled the spread of land plants.