An Oregon scientist has discovered an ancient bee thought to be 100 million years old and almost perfectly preserved in a block of amber, the journal Science is reporting in its upcoming issue, reported the Deutsche Presse Agentur dpa. The bee is about 40 million years older than the previous oldest bee discovered. It was found by zoology professor George Poinar, from Oregon State University, in a piece of amber from a mine in the Hukawng Valley of northern Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. The semiprecious rock also contained four tiny flowers. The discovery is significant as it can help scientists figure out how similar creatures pollinated ancient plants and helped create the huge diversity of plant matter on the planet. Amber begins as tree sap that can ooze over insects that happen to land in it, sealing them inside. Over time, the sap turns into a semiprecious stone, and the bug inside is fossilized. The premise of the dinosaur movie Jurassic Park involved the recreation of dinosaurs by using the DNA in a tiny drop of blood found in a fossilized mosquito inside amber. Poinar is one of the world's leading experts on ancient insects found in amber. He said that the ancient male bee is not a honeybee and not related to any modern bee family. About one fifth the size of a honeybee, the species has some common features with meat-eating wasps but is probably an early evolutionary example of honeybees that is long extinct. "This is an intermediate form, kind of like the archaeopteryx," Poinar told the Oregon Register, referring to the part-reptile, part- bird creature that marks another major split in animal evolution. "This bee is a specimen that still has wasp characteristics. It's mostly bee, but it still has a bit of wasp." Poinar said the bee is so well preserved that it's possible to see its head, wings and legs and even individual pollen-collecting hairs. "This bee would have been flitting around between dinosaurs as it went from flower to flower," he said. "This was quite exciting once I realized what it was." --spa
