Credit: SCIENCE

It's a once-in-a-lifetime event. The creatures pictured here are members of the first new order of insects to be discovered since before the First World War. The Mantophasmatodea, as they have been christened, take their place alongside the other 30-odd insect orders such as beetles, flies and termites.

Writing in Science (online 19 April 2002; DOI 10.1126/ science.1069397), Klaus Klass and colleagues have described the first two species of the order from museum specimens. Collected in Tanzania and Namibia in the early years of the last century, the specimens had languished unidentified in Lund, Sweden, and Berlin.

Most exciting of all, an expedition to Namibia earlier this year found living mantophasmatodid species in the tall grass atop the country's Brandberg Mountains. All specimens found so far are about two centimetres long. Analysis of stomach contents shows that they eat other insects. Three or four more species await description.

There are also fossil specimens. The species Raptophasma, described last year from an insect trapped in amber, shows that mantophasmatodids were present in Europe during the Eocene, about 45 million years ago. The living African species might be the remnants of a once-widespread group now perilously close to extinction, or they might still be widespread in Africa.

Klass et al. suggest that the new order is most closely related to the stick insects, and to a group called the Grylloblattodea, or ice-crawlers. This group, known from about 25 species found on mountaintops in North America and Asia, was the last new order, discovered in 1914. DNA sequencing now under way might help to pin down the Mantophasmatodea's exact position in the tree of life.