DINO BEE

100m years old. If you have ever seen any of the Jurassic Park franchise, you’ll be familiar with the concept of an insects preserved in amber. Although this is indeed a thing, most of the fossil record for pollinators actually spans only the last 65 million years (and thus very few fossil bees actually co-existed with the dinosaurs). Bees, when they turn up at all in the fossil record, look very much like modern bees. However…

In 2020, Oregon State University paleo-entemologists published a paper in ‘BioOne Complete’, on the discovery of a very unusual, 100 Million year old, and very well preserved, bee ancestor that caused a small buzz. Well, what else.

This elder specimen displayed more wasp-like physical traits, as might be expected from the family tree. Researcher George Poinar Jr, described it as a “new family” that hinted at the changes that a honeybee’s cariverous ancestors had to undergo “as they became palynivores”, the posh word for pollen eaters.