"extinct insects" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you want to talk about certain insects that have gone extinct. For example: "Scientists have identified many extinct insects in fossilized remains."
Who wouldn't want to be remembered as an extinct insect, or hang out with a man who spends his time dissecting the genitals of dead flies?
This new fossil provides a unique insight into the anatomy and life cycle of a long-extinct insect; it also demonstrates that brood care in insects is an ancient trait that dates back to at least around 100 million years ago at the height of the age of the dinosaurs.
Arthropoda (Fig. 2) includes the extinct trilobites, the insects, the myriapods (millipedes, centipedes, and relatives), the crustaceans (e.g., crabs, lobsters, shrimp), and the chelicerates (arachnids, such as spiders, scorpions and mites, and horseshoe crabs).
Most extinct orders of insects developed during the Permian period that began around 270 million years ago.
It is also conceivable that these feeding tracks were produced by groups other than hispine Cassidinae [16], perhaps due to convergent feeding patterns in other extant or extinct leaf feeding insect lineages [25].
Once abundant on their nearby namesake island, the insects went extinct there shortly after the introduction of rats in 1918.
"As far as I know, this is the only example of a pest insect driven extinct anywhere" in the history of agriculture, he said.
It's notable that creationists never seem to target research on, say, very ancient fish or insects, or recently extinct horses, and focus only on the charismatic dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles or certain big mammals such as mammoths.
A well-known exception is the diversity of compound eyes (like those of modern insects) documented in extinct trilobites, because the lenses of tiny calcite crystals are hard, and are often preserved as fossils (for a review see Fortey 2000).
Enjoying the sunshine in Britain were record numbers of the large blue butterfly, an insect that became extinct in 1979 but was revived via caterpillars brought from Sweden in a camper van.
