"Orthopteroid" Insects

A number of major clades of insects have at one time or another been grouped in a loose assemblage of taxa, sometimes called the Orthoptera or Orthopteroida (meaning "straight-wing" in Greek). While it seems likely that these "orthopteroid" groups are fairly closely related to each other, exactly how they are related is not fully understood, although new molecular studies are providing some important information (e.g. Kambhampati, 1995). Since we are not sure whether the "orthopteroids" are monophyletic or paraphyletic, we have chosen simply to list the major groups. Eventually we will provide pages for these taxa.

• Blattaria -- roaches (pictured above)
• Isoptera -- termites
• Mantoidea -- mantises

The above three groups are sometimes classified together as the Dictyoptera, a grouping supported by molecular phylogenetic analysis (Kambhampati, 1995).

• Phasmida -- stick insects
• Dermaptera -- earwigs
• Orthoptera -- true crickets, grasshoppers, katydids
• Grylloblattodea -- mole crickets
• Embioptera, or Embiidina -- web-spinners
  • View the World List of Extant and Fossil Embiidina from the California Academy of Sciences.
• Zoraptera -- zorapterans
• Titanoptera -- extinct insect group (Triassic)
• Protorthoptera -- extinct insect group (Pennsylvanian-Triassic); probably including ancestors or relatives of ancestors of other orthopteroid taxa, thus paraphyletic.
  • View a protorthopteran fossil from the Carboniferous of Mazon Creek, Illinois, from the Illinois State Museum

We hope to have more information on the various orthopteroid groups eventually. Until then, we recommend the University of Delaware College of Agricultural Sciences Insect Database for information on several of these taxa.

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Carpenter, F. M. 1992. Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Part R. Arthropoda 4, Volume 3: Superclass Hexapoda. Geological Society of America and University of Kansas, Boulder, Colorado and Lawrence, Kansas.

Kambhampati, S. 1995. A phylogeny of cockroaches and related insects based on DNA sequence of mitochondrial ribosomal RNA genes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 92: 2017-2020.