How did insects evolve?

We put this question to Georgia Mills and Zephyr Penoyre...

Georgia - Insects are very strange-looking sometimes. But if you look across the whole animal kingdom, there are some really, really weird ones. Look up water bears, if you get a minute, they're some of the strangest creatures you'll ever see. There's also.

Chris - What's one of those?

Georgia - They're these tiny little creatures that can basically just survive anything. they look like something from a studio Ghibli film. They're like really, really creepy tiny things. but insects did almost certainly are in the same tree of life as all other animals. The reason we know this is from things like DNA sequencing and also from the fossil record. Insect fossils are very hard to come by but there are a few that look like transitions between insects and their close relatives, the other arthropods. And did insects come from a comet? Well, like you mentioned Zephyr, there's the theory that all life came from a comet. This is panspermia. This is an interesting debate but if it did happen like this, it's likely that all life came this way. If a comet arrive now with some exciting new microbes on it, it's likely that the current biology of the planet which is gobble it up.

Chris - Zephyr.

Zephyr - They actually sent some tardigrades - water bears - up into space!, not really planning to get them back down, and they got them back down and found that they were fine! They'd survived the vacuum of freezing cold space absolutely fine!