Hey there, friends, and welcome to episode 254 of Just the Zoo of Us.

In this week's episode, I am joined by a special guest science communicator for a review,

as in a look back on the half a billion year story of bugs,

from trilobites swimming around in Cambrian oceans, all the way up to the bees and

butterflies and ants of today. It is an era's tour of bugs. We discuss ancient millipedes as long as

a horse, whether we would rather fight two million ant-sized humans or one human-sized ant,

the arms races and tiny empires and intertwined

symbiotic relationships that have shaped the very planet into the world we know today. And so much more,

of course, it is an extra long episode for a reason. Before we get into it, just as a quick housekeeping

note, August's bonus episode went up last

week. I had fellow maximum fun host Alex Schmidt of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Join me to share

his experiences on the game show, Jeopardy, and play a little bespoke, animal-themed quiz game show I like to call Leopardy. It was really, really fun.

If you're already a maximum fund supporter, you can go check that out in your bonus feed right now.

If you haven't signed up yet, but you want to hear that and all of our other monthly bonus episodes,

head over to maximum fun.org slash join. Now, Just the Zoo of Us presents the History of Bugs with Luca's

biohub. Hey there, everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here with Just the Zoo of Us, your

favorite animal review podcast where this week we're taking the word review a little bit

differently than we normally do. We are looking back at some animals through history, through like deep history, like geological history, which I find to be very fascinating.

I'm so excited to get to know about it.

This week we have a brand new friend.

This is Luca from Luca's Bio Hub.

Can you please say hi, Luca?

...