'100 Million-Year-Old Bee' The Buzz

A '100 million-year-old bee' that was found by a scientist has the whole scientific community buzzing.  The 100-million-year-old bee is a wee bee -- only 0.116 inch long, about the thickness of two pennies -- is about 40 million years older than previously found bees. It's the first bee to be traced back to the age of the dinosaurs.

So why is this important?  Funding - well and science.

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The discovery of the ancient pollinator may help explain the rapid expansion and diversity of flowering plants during that time as 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," Oregon scientist George Poinar a zoology professor at Oregon State University and the man that found the bee said.

Prior to that, the world was dominated by "gymnosperms," largely conifer trees, which used wind for pollination and re-seeding.

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According to the report that will be published on Friday in the journal Science these changes took place during the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 65.5 million to 145.5 million years ago. The earliest angiosperms didn't really begin to spread rapidly until a little over 100 millions years ago, a time that appears to correspond with the evolution of bees seen in the new fossil.

"Flowering plants are very important in the evolution of life," Poinar said.
"They can reproduce more quickly, develop more genetic diversity, spread more easily and move into new habitats. But prior to the evolution of bees they didn't have any strong mechanism to spread their pollen, only a few flies and beetles that didn't go very far."

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Insects trapped in amber, researchers say, often provide some of the most vivid and lifelike glimpses into the distant past.

Amber is a semi-precious stone that begins as tree sap, which can ooze down and trap insects or other small things, then ultimately fossilize. It's also a natural embalming agent that can protect and display specimens in nearly perfect, three-dimensional form millions of years later.
This phenomenon has been invaluable in scientific and ecological research, and among other things, formed the scientific premise in the movie Jurassic Park, for the "dinosaur DNA" found in mosquitoes.

Plus - this discovery certainly can't hurt funding.