I wish Dr. Poinar would stick to mosquitos and other blood-sucking insects, so we can get our hands on some dino-DNA and commence the cloning of T-rexes already. Why is it so hard for the nerd to understand and give the people what they want???
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."
I wish there was a photo.
I wish Dr. Poinar would stick to mosquitos and other blood-sucking insects, so we can get our hands on some dino-DNA and commence the cloning of T-rexes already. Why is it so hard for the nerd to understand and give the people what they want???
ping
Now that's pretty cool looking.
Never unserstood this part...how does tree sap (from an organic process) become a stone?
Creating quite a "buzz" in the scientific community.
Coal is also from an organic process, as is limestone.
A bee-dance pattern found in the amber was decyphered to read "You damn kids stay off of my lawn!"
I don't see any diverse license! So who knows how old this bug could bee!
I would really like to know how these scientists determine how something is a million years old.
What is the difference between determining if the bee is a million years old or a half a million? what about a million and a half? what bee criteria do they use?
Beecuz he does have a license.
It's a class Bee.
Simple.
If it remembers Helen Thomas as a child, it is a million years old.
Your stinging puns are beeginning to give me hives.
Haha..Now I understand the formula!...
It dries out and hardens. This keeps happening until what is left after the volatiles are gone is rock hard. Over 50 million years even the heavy volatiles evaporate. Also, there could be a setting up reaction like happens in concrete, polymer chains lengthen over time.
Vroom! Vroom!
"...the ancient bee may help explain the rapid expansion and diversity of flowering plants during that time..."
All in all, this "discovery" doesn't give me the excitement it does these scientist, but the above statement did bring to mind an interesting mental picture. Gives new meaning to "busy bee."
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