This insect belongs to the Apterygota, wingless insects, and they are mostly very small and belong to four orders; 1. Thysanura. 2. Diplura. 3. Protura. 4. Collembola. We will be mainly concerned with the Thysanura. These are the three pronged bristle tails and contain the two commonest, Silverfish and Firebrat, the latter we will cover at a later stage as it is not known to damage textiles.

It is probably about 300 million years ago that the first animal looking something like a silverfish saw the light of day. It was doubtless very widely distributed and occurred in enormous numbers, and it has been suggested that the primitive animals of this type may well have been the ancestors of all the different types of insects alive today. Some insects, including the silverfish, have remained more or less unchanged over long periods. Indeed it is likely that there were primitive insects of this type when the first fish went up onto the land, and that they crawled around the feet of dinosaurs, and they are still with us. Silverfish can in fact be regarded as living fossils comparable with the Coelacanth.

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