New Study Suggests Ancient Bees Went Extinct Same Time as Dinosaurs
Ancient carpenter bees, specifically
The ancestors of modern carpenter bees may have vanished from Earth roughly 65 million years ago, around the same time the dinosaurs were wiped out, a new study finds.
Researchers examined the DNA of four types of carpenter bees — belonging to the groupXylocopinae — from every continent, except Antarctica, to search for clues about their evolutionary relationships. Peering back into the lineages of the bees, the scientists noticed something unusual with all four groups, beginning roughly 65 million years ago, at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods.