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The Insect Orders

A Living Guide to All 28 Orders of Insecta  ·  by Vladimír Štrunc

The Insect Books portfolio steps up from beetle families to the entire class: a comprehensive treatment of all 28 currently recognised insect orders, with 58 suborders and 32 infraorders covering more than 1,100 families and roughly one million described species. Built on the modern phylogenomic backbone of Misof et al. (2014), Wipfler et al. (2019) and Kawahara et al. (2019), with a unified 203-character data matrix.

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Eight in ten animals on Earth are insects

Insects — class Insecta — are the most successful group of organisms ever to have evolved on land. The fossil record places their origin in the Devonian, more than 410 million years ago. Today roughly a million species have been formally described, with credible estimates of true diversity ranging from five to ten million. Lepisma saccharina, the silverfish on every bathroom floor, has changed little in 300 million years — sister to all winged insects on Earth.

Distributed across every continent including Antarctica, every habitat from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to high-elevation glacier surfaces, the class is divided by modern phylogenomics into five superorders — Apterygota, Palaeoptera, Polyneoptera, Paraneoptera and Holometabola — and 28 currently recognised orders. From bristletails leaping on sea-spray rocks to scale insects sessile on plant stems, from praying mantises in tropical forests to the trillion-strong cockroach hordes of Blattodea — every major evolutionary route the insects took is here in one matrix.

Why this guide — and why now

The last comprehensive general treatment of all insect orders accessible to a non-specialist reader is Grimaldi & Engel’s Evolution of the Insects (2005) — a magnificent work, now twenty years old. Two decades on, the deep phylogeny of Insecta has been rebuilt from the ground up:

• The 1KITE consortium phylogenomics — Misof et al. (2014) in Science — provided the first taxon-rich, gene-rich resolution of the insect tree, settling decades of arguments about deep branching.
• Polyneoptera phylogeny was completely overhauled — Wipfler et al. (2019) in PNAS — reshaping the relationships of Orthoptera, Mantodea, Blattodea and the “orthopteroid” complex.
• Lepidoptera, the second most diverse order, has been re-resolved by Kawahara et al. (2019) and the moth tree is now phylogenomically anchored down to family level.
• Coleoptera — the most diverse order — received its integrated phylogenomic + fossil resolution in Cai et al. (2022) in Royal Society Open Science.
• The Strepsiptera enigma — centuries of disputed placement — was finally resolved by Niehuis et al. (2012): sister to Coleoptera, not relatives of flies.

This guide is the first to integrate all of that — at order, suborder and infraorder level, with a unified 203-character data matrix and verifiable citations to primary literature. Each of the 28 orders is anchored to the Misof (2014) backbone, with order-specific phylogenies (Kawahara 2019 for Lepidoptera, Cai 2022 for Coleoptera, Wipfler 2019 for Polyneoptera, and twelve more) layered on top.

What each of the 28 order accounts contains

A Living Book — built to stay current

Insect phylogenomics moves fast. New papers regularly reshuffle the deepest branches; molecular data revises group boundaries; new orders are even occasionally erected (Mantophasmatodea was only described in 2002). A static textbook is obsolete the year it ships.

The Insect Orders is part of the Living Books series — a new generation of digital reference works that continue to grow after publication.

Updates are pushed automatically to your FlipHTML5 access; a regenerated PDF is sent by email at each minor release (typically twice per year).

Five superorders, twenty-eight orders

The modern phylogenomic resolution of Insecta places the 28 orders into five superorders. Each represents a distinct phase in the 410-million-year evolutionary story of the class.

Who this guide is for

Quality assurance — how this guide was built

This is not a compilation. The underlying data matrix has been through 40 documented revision cycles, with a current weighted citation score of 86.6 / 100 against 92 character guarantors, and with explicit auditing against:

• Misof et al. (2014) — Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. Science. The 1KITE consortium backbone, primary topology authority.
• Kawahara et al. (2019) — Phylogenomics reveals the evolutionary timing and pattern of butterflies and moths. PNAS. The Lepidoptera resolution.
• Wipfler et al. (2019) — Evolutionary history of Polyneoptera. PNAS. The orthopteroid backbone.
• Cai et al. (2022) — Integrated phylogenomics and fossil data illuminate the evolution of beetles. Royal Society Open Science. The Coleoptera resolution.
• Niehuis et al. (2012) — Genomic and morphological evidence converge to resolve the enigma of Strepsiptera. Current Biology. The Strepsiptera resolution.
• Beutel et al. (2014) — Insect Morphology and Phylogeny. De Gruyter. Core morphological reference for character coding.
• Grimaldi & Engel (2005) — Evolution of the Insects. Cambridge University Press. The synthesis that this Living Book updates.
• Bouchard et al. (2011, 2017) — family-group names of Coleoptera, biodiversity overview. Nomenclatural authority across all orders.

Every claim in the matrix is tagged with its source reference. Where literature conflicts — and across 28 orders, it does — the conflict is explicitly resolved in a documented audit log, not silently averaged.

About the author — Vladimír Štrunc

Vladimír Štrunc is an entomological book publisher based in the Czech Republic. After building the Insect Books portfolio across beetle families — Cicindelidae, Cerambycidae, Prioninae, Carabidae, Buprestidae — The Insect Orders takes the same approach up one taxonomic level. The underlying matrix integrates 146 primary references, from Linnaeus (1758) to the most recent phylogenomic papers of 2025.

The Insect Books portfolio so far has focused on specific beetle families — depth at narrow taxonomic scope. The Insect Orders is the breadth volume: one matrix, one set of phylogenomic references, all 28 orders of the class Insecta. It is the entry point into the entire portfolio for any reader new to insect diversity, and the comparative cross-reference for anyone already working on a single family.

The Insect Orders is part of Štrunc’s Living Books publishing series — continuously updated scientific references.

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A comprehensive class-level reference for Insecta — all 28 orders, 58 suborders, 32 infraorders, with a unified 203-character data matrix, 146 primary references, and the modern phylogenomic backbone from Misof, Kawahara, Wipfler, Cai and twelve more 21st-century papers.

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Part of the Living Books series by Vladimír Štrunc · insect-books.com