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About this episode

Pollinating insects and plants have co-evolved throughout their history.

From about 125 million to 90 million years ago, cone-bearing plants were replaced by flowering plants as the dominant vegetation. This switch – the ‘Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution’ – had profound effects on pollinating insects.

Dr Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History wanted to answer a chicken-and-egg question: did insect pollination or flowers come first? To answer this question, his team examined insect fossils from before the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution.

Original Article Reference

This video is based on the paper ‘Life habits and evolutionary biology of new two-winged long-proboscid scorpionflies from mid-Cretaceous Myanmar amber, Nature Communications, 2019, 10, 1235.’ doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09236-4

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