Most modern gymnosperms—conifers and gingkoes, for instance—rely on the wind to spread their pollen. For some gymnosperms called cycads, insects serve as their pollen shuttle service, and did so long before flowering plants needed bees and butterflies for pollination. The discovery, published today (August 16) in Current Biology, of a beetle fossilized in Burmese amber together with grains of cycad pollen reveals that the relationship between these plants and insects may have begun long before the 99-million-year-old fossil formed—at least 167 million years ago—the earliest evidence uncovered to date.
This amber fossil “almost captures behavior, and that’s really hard in the fossil record,” says Nathalie Nagalingum, a plant evolutionary biologist at the California Academy of Sciences who was not involved in the study. “It’s not exactly showing that the pollen grains were on the insects, but it’s almost there. It’s kind of remarkable.”
Previous findings have shown that both beetles ...
