A group of international researchers has released the first comprehensive family tree for the world’s insects.

It has been 479 million years since the first insects appeared on Earth, and it took about 100 researchers to build the first extended family tree for the incredibly diverse group of species that includes one in every two animals on the planet, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Although insects can be essential to the environment by recycling plant and animal material, pollinating food sources, and providing food to many animals, they can also spread diseases — and researchers hope to help deal with those diseases by better understanding their evolution.

One interested discovery has been that bugs first started developing the ability to fly about 405 million years ago, with a primitive dragonfly taking the lead right at about the time when plants on Earth started increasing in height. It gave new insects an advantage over crawlers by better being able to escape predators and find food.

The next evolution in the insect kingdom was the development of a sucking mouth, which allowed it to feed on plants.

Still others began to metamorphose from larve into pupa and then adults, as moths and butterflies do today.

The team of researchers was able to map out the insect’s evolutionary family tree use huge genetic data sets that were integrated with available fossil evidence, allowing them to determine relationships between species hundreds of millions of years ago. They used super-powered computers to parse through the massive volume of data.

Experts from fields including molecular biology, insect morphology, paleontology, insect taxonomy, and computing participated in the study.

Their findings were published in the journal Science.