Stick bug renews world record of insects

A stick bug from the island of Borneo measuring well over a foot in length has been identified by researchers as the world's longest insect, British scientists said on Thursday.

The specimen was found by a local villager and handed to Malaysian amateur naturalist Datuk Chan Chew Lun in 1989, according to Philip Bragg, who formally identified the insect in this month's issue of peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa. The insect was named Phobaeticus chani, or "Chan's megastick," in Chan's honor.

Paul Brock, a scientific associate of the Natural History Museum in London unconnected to the insect's discovery said there was no doubt it was the longest still in existence. That assessment was also confirmed by Marco Gottardo, an entomologist at Italy's Natural History Museum of Ferrara and Aaron T. Dossey, a researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville who studies the insects.