At a time in our intellectual history when we seem to have gone mad for numbers, millipedes - which today are found in perhaps a mere ten thousand known                                          species, compared with the more than a million species of the Class Insecta - may not seem to be one of life's notable experimental successes. Yet if we consider all the various failed experiments             that millipedes,                                     had they powers of observation,             could have witnessed during the more than four hundred             million years                                     [that] they have been creeping around on                                     this planet, maybe we should think otherwise... Somewhere back in those times even before there is a record of insects, the millipede emerged from the seas and began adapting defenses against whatever strategies other life-forms came up with in attempting to turn them into dinner; outlasting many flashier experiments; enduring - with only modest changes down to the present - cataclysm, mass extinctions, and climate change. If that isn't success, I don't know what is. Sue Hubbell, " Millipede Summers, Silurian Nights"