In new research, scientists suggest the vast population of bees was wiped out about 66 million years ago, about the same time the dinosaurs went extinct, BBC News reported.
Thus far, the scientific community has accepted the event that killed off the dinosaurs was almost certainly a massive comet striking Earth. But the new study, published in the journal PLOS One, suggests the explosion was selective.
Some creatures are living evidence of the dinosaurs, like certain lizards, but another might not be quite as obvious. The researchers examined the subgroup of bees known as the carpenter, or Xylocopinae.
The team made this decision because the bee can be traced back to the Cretaceous period, a time shared by dinosaurs. Previous work had already detailed a dying-off of flowering plants during the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that occurred 66 million years ago. With it, the bees that depended on the plants would have gone too.
Unlike the wealth of information on dinosaurs, lead study author Sandra Rehan, a biologist at the University of New Hampshire, said, "there is a relatively poor fossil record of bees."
Still, the researchers were able to use an extinct group of carpenter bees to use a method of marking the time of extinction for these bees.
"The data told us something major was happening in four different groups of bees at the same time," said Dr. Rehan. "And it happened to be the same time as the dinosaurs went extinct."
The research could be a valuable resource to scientists working to solve the growing problem of less diverse population of bees. Bees play a vital role in agriculture, which is extremely important to local economies around the globe. Understanding part of bees' history could help those trying to solve their problems now.
"Understanding extinctions and the effects of declines in the past can help us understand the pollinator decline and the global crisis in pollinators today," said Dr. Rehan.
