Caroline Morley, online picture researcher
(Image: Enrique Pe?alver, IGME)
Insects and plants have a long, entwined history through pollination. Plants attract insects through their flowers' colour and scent, often providing their visitors with food. For their part, the insects unwittingly carry the pollen from one plant to another thus playing a key role in the plant's sexual reproduction.
This photo gives a glimpse to how the relationship began. It shows the earliest known record of pollen grains trapped in the hairs of an insect preserved in prehistoric sap that hardened to form amber. The amber is one of two pieces containing several thrips covered in pollen from a cycad or gingko tree found in Cretaceous deposits in northern Spain making them around 115 million years old. Thrips are tiny, primitive insects with wings made of a fringe of hairs.
Below is an image created using synchroton X-ray tomography of one of the insects (identified as Gymnospollisthrips minor). The pollen has been highlighted in yellow.
(Image: ESRF)
"Thrips might indeed turn out to be one of the first pollinator groups in geological history," said Carmen Soriano of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility who led the investigation. Because all the insects trapped in the amber are female, the researchers have suggested that they are carrying the pollen to feed their young.
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