Scientists have discovered a shocking origin of a creature that thrives in nature and is cultivated by humans around the world: They are the “friends” of dinosaurs from the supercontinent Gondwana.
A new study conducted by the University of São Paulo in Brazil and Washington State University in the United States, both located on land that was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana during the age of dinosaurs.
This fascinating creature, a “living fossil” that survived the mass extinction caused by the Chicxulub meteorite 66 million years ago, is the bee.
A 99 million-year-old bee perfectly preserved in a piece of amber from Myanmar – (Photo: OREGON UNIVERSITY (USA)).
Previously, it was only known that the cooperation between bees and plants—specifically, bees pollinating plants—emerged 120 million years ago, but there was not much certainty about how and when bees spread globally.
Dr. Silas Bossert from Washington State University, Dr. Eduardo Almeida from the University of São Paulo, and their colleagues sequenced and compared the genomes of over 200 bee species from around the world, according to Sci-News.
They compared these genomes with features from 185 different bee fossils, including extinct species.
This evidence led them to their origin: the arid region in the western part of the supercontinent Gondwana during the early Cretaceous period (145-66 million years ago).
During that era, the world was divided into two supercontinents: Laurasia in the North and Gondwana in the South. Laurasia included present-day Europe, Asia, and North America, while Gondwana encompassed the remaining continents.
After a period of existence, Gondwana split into Western Gondwana (including South America and Africa) and Eastern Gondwana (Oceania and Antarctica).
The bee species quickly spread across their “homeland” supercontinent and the rest of the globe, having classified all major bee families before the dawn of the Tertiary period, the transitional period following the Cretaceous.
The “living fossil” from the Cretaceous continued to thrive after the mass extinction of dinosaurs, spreading further and filling ecological niches in the subsequent Paleogene, Neogene, and Quaternary periods. The Quaternary is the geological period we currently exist in.
This intriguing study has just been published in the scientific journal Current Biology.
