The origin of bees is tens of millions of years older than most previous estimates, a new study shows.
A team led by Washington State University researchers traced the bee genealogy back more than 120 million years to an ancient supercontinent, Gondwana, which included today’s continents of Africa and South America.
In a study that proposes a new evolutionary history of bees, the researchers found evidence that bees originated earlier, diversified faster and spread wider than many scientists previously suspected. They published their findings in the journal Current Biology.
“There’s been a longstanding puzzle about the spatial origin of bees,” said Silas Bossert, assistant professor with WSU’s Department of Entomology, who co-led the project with Eduardo Almeida, associate professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Working with collaborators on every continent who assisted with sampling and computational analysis, Bossert and Almeida’s team sequenced and compared genes from more than 200 bee species. They compared them with traits from 185 different bee fossils, as well as extinct species, developing an evolutionary history and genealogical models for historical bee distribution.
2023-08-01 02:48:03
Article from phys.org