Short notes and reviews Insect history

Review of: History of Insects, edited by A. P. Rasnitsyn and D. L. J. Quicke. Kluwer Academic Publ., Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2002, 517 pp., ISBN 14 0200 026 X In the winter of 1977, I visited the Paleontological Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. I wanted to study the type specimens of fossil crustaceans, which were housed in the Laboratory of Paleoentomology. I thought that strange at the time, but then there were not many fossil crustaceans known from Russia and guessed that someone had decided that the collection for fossil hexapods was the best place to store the shrimp. It was on that occasion that I first encountered the fossil insect research group under the direction of Prof. Boris Borissevich Rohdendorf. It surprised me to discover that there were about 12 paleoentomologists working in that laboratory, more paleoentomologists than there were in the whole of the rest of the world. Looking back on those times, my ignorance should not have been too surprising. There was much that we in the West did not know about our colleagues in the old Soviet Union, and vice-versa. I brought along a stack of my reprints as a gift, and Prof. Rohdendorf eagerly grabbed them and retreated to his desk in the corner of the room. I felt honored that he was so interested in my work until I saw that he was ignoring my texts and thumbing through the reference lists. “Excuse me,” he looked up and said, “It is not that I have no interest in your work, but for us it is also important to see what papers you used in your research. We know so little about western literature.” I felt the same away about Russian fossil insect studies.