Posted on 10/30/2006 8:19:35 AM PST by presidio9
A scientist has found a 100 million-year-old bee trapped in amber, making it possibly the oldest bee ever found.
"I knew right away what it was, because I had seen bees in younger amber before," said George Poinar, a zoology professor at Oregon State University.
The bee is about 40 million years older than previously found bees. The discovery of the ancient bee may help explain the rapid expansion and diversity of flowering plants during that time.
Poinar found the bee in amber from a mine in the Hukawng Valley of northern Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Many researchers buy bags of amber from miners to search for fossils. Amber, a translucent semiprecious stone, is a substance that begins as tree resin. The sticky resin entombs and preserves insects, pollen and other small organisms.
Also embedded in the amber are four kinds of flowers. "So we can imagine this little bee flitting around these tiny flowers millions of years ago," Poinar said.
An article on his discovery will appear Friday in the journal Science, co-authored by bee researcher Bryan Danforth of Cornell University.
In the competing journal Nature this week, there is an article about the unraveling of the genetic map of the honeybee. The recently completed sequencing of the honeybee genome already is giving scientists fresh insights into the social insects.
Poinar's ancient male bee, Melittosphex burmensis, is not a honeybee and not related to any modern bee family.
The pollen-eating bee has a few features of meat-eating wasps, such as narrow hind legs, but the body's branched hairs are a key feature of pollen-spreading bees.
The bee — about one-fifth the size of today's worker honeybee — has a heart-shaped head.
But the ancient bee was probably an evolutionary dead end and may not have given rise to modern bees, scientists said.
"It's exciting to see something that seems so different from what we think of as modern bees," Danforth said. "It's not an ancestor of honeybees, but probably was a species on an early branch of the evolutionary tree of bees that went extinct."
The URL is not working!
Belushi in Killer Bee outfit.
Oh......
;)
Ah... it's working now!
That one also works! :-P
I'm not sure just how much American telly you get over there. Do you get the referrence?
What show is it? Something rings a bell....
That's Andy Griffith with Aunt Bea. You may remember his show for starring child actor Ron Howard, and having the catchiest theme-song in the history of television (the whole thing was whistled).
Ah, I heard of it, but I don't think it has been shown over here... not in recent times, atleast.
An inspiration to beedogs everywhere:
http://www.beedogs.com/
Bee all that you can bee.
According to some, early bees were carnivorous. (Though they didn't live a million years ago, much less over a hundred million years ago).
|
|
|
| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
|
|
Thanks presidio9. |
|
|
|
|
Wow... and I thought turtles lived a long time.
I thought Natalie Schafer had been dead for years.
I had a friend who taught his cockatiel to whistle that theme song. Very, very cool.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.