Insects fed on pollen created flowers

INSECTS fed on and spread pollen 125 million years ago just like they do today, a study of a fossilised bug reveals.

The creature, which was found persevered in amber in Myanmar, was discovered with bits of fossilised poo that showed it exclusively ate pollen.

Two hundred million years ago the world was as green as today, overgrown with dense vegetation, but there were no flowers. Flowering plants – angiosperms – only began to diversify 125 million years ago.

Some scientists have attributed the huge evolutionary success of flowering plants to their mutually beneficial relationships with insects, but fossil evidence of Cretaceous pollinators has so far been scarce.

However, this latest discovery, made by researchers at the University of Bristol and the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published in the journal Nature Plants, possibly confirms their suspicions the spread of angiosperms was down to these pollen-hungry insects.