Washington: A new study claimed that bees also underwent massive extinction when dinosaurs did millions of years ago.
For the first time ever, scientists have documented a widespread extinction of bees that occurred 65 million years ago, concurrent with the massive event that wiped out land dinosaurs and many flowering plants.
The findings could shed light on the current decline in bee species.
Lead author Sandra Rehan, an assistant professor of biological sciences at UNH, worked with colleagues Michael Schwarz at Australia`s Flinders University and Remko Leys at the South Australia Museum to model a mass extinction in bee group Xylocopinae, or carpenter bees, at the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Paleogene eras, known as the K-T boundary.
Previous studies have suggested a widespread extinction among flowering plants at the K-T boundary, and it`s long been assumed that the bees who depended upon those plants would have met the same fate.
Yet unlike the dinosaurs, "there is a relatively poor fossil record of bees," Rehan said, making the confirmation of such an extinction difficult.
Rehan and colleagues overcame the lack of fossil evidence for bees with a technique called molecular phylogenetics.
Analyzing DNA sequences of four "tribes" of 230 species of carpenter bees from every continent except Antarctica for insight into evolutionary relationships, the researchers began to see patterns consistent with a mass extinction.
Combining fossil records with the DNA analysis, the researchers could introduce time into the equation, learning not only how the bees are related but also how old they are.
The study is published this week in the journal PLOS ONE.
