Grasshoppers Evolved Long Before Grass

Grasshopper relatives date back about 250 million years, while the earliest known grasses appeared much later, making grasshoppers older than grass.

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Grasshoppers have a surprisingly ancient evolutionary history. The broader grasshopper and locust lineage belongs to Caelifera, a branch of Orthoptera whose origins reach roughly 250 million years into the past. That puts their ancestors around the Permian and Triassic transition, long before the familiar grasslands of today existed. The fossil record of grasses begins much later, with evidence showing that grasses were already present during the Cretaceous. The oldest known grass macrofossils are about 110 to 94 million years old, while other evidence suggests some grass lineages were present even earlier. This means the ancestors of grasshoppers were already hopping around tens or even more than a hundred million years before recognizable grasses became established. The comparison is also a reminder that evolutionary dates are reconstructed from fossils, anatomy, and genetic evidence rather than from a single perfectly preserved specimen. Both insect and plant histories are incomplete, so scientists use multiple lines of evidence to estimate when major groups appeared and diversified.

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