Scientists studying a Caribbean island cave have unearthed something unexpected: ancient bees very much unlike the hive-dwelling insects we\u2019re most familiar with.<\/p>\n
For the first time ever, paleontologists have found fossil traces of burrowing bees nesting inside the buried bones of other animals. These fossils, thousands of years old, are the end result of a macabre life cycle that involved ancient rodents and giant barn owls. And they might also teach us a few lessons about bees today, the researchers say.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the most important outcome is to show how diverse the nesting behavior of bees can be,\u201d study researcher Lazaro Vi\u00f1ola Lopez told Gizmodo.<\/p>\n
A \u201cfortuitous\u201d discovery <\/p>\n
Vi\u00f1ola Lopez was working as a doctoral student for the Florida Museum of Natural History when he helped excavate the fossils from inside the cave on the island of Hispaniola (the cave is located on the eastern half of the island, owned by the Dominican Republic). But neither he nor his colleagues were planning to make such a find.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe discovery was very fortuitous. We were looking for primates, rodents, lizards, and other vertebrates for our work on late Quaternary extinctions in the islands associated with humans and climatic changes,\u201d he said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t looking for any insects because they usually don\u2019t preserve in that kind of environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cave, named Cueva de Mono, contained thousands of fossils belonging to hutia, rodents related to the guinea pig. This discovery was amazing enough, given how rare hutia fossils were to find in the area. But Vi\u00f1ola Lopez also noticed that one of the fossils, a specimen of hutia mandibles, had an unusual smoothness to it.<\/p>\n
Vi\u00f1ola Lopez didn\u2019t immediately dig deeper into his potential finding, and there were some bumps along the way. Based on his earlier work with dinosaur fossils, he initially speculated the hutia remains were used by wasps to build their nests, but the features of such nests didn\u2019t quite match up with what he found.<\/p>\n
Eventually though, he realized these remains were likely used by a different insect, an ancient species of burrowing bee, named Osnidum almontei, that lived thousands of years ago. Thanks to later trips inside the cave to recover more fossils, they also found evidence of these nests inside the vertebra of a hutia and the pulp cavity of a sloth tooth (sloths used to live in the Caribbean islands, but were largely wiped out<\/a> by human activity).<\/p>\n