Russian scientists discover world's oldest pollinators which are older than mosquitos of Jurassic Park

Palaeontologists have found fossils of the oldest known insects and perhaps the world’s first-ever plant pollinators in Russia. The rare fossils of the earwig-like insects, known as tillyardembiids were discovered along the riverbank near the village of Chekarda in Russia. 

At 280 million years old, the specimens predate what were previously the earliest known pollen-covered insects by about 120 million years. It is also one of the oldest ever insects, older than the mosquitoes found in Jurassic Park, which were nearly 200 million years old. 

Tillyardembiids are flattened creatures and had clumps of pollen on their heads, bodies and legs. These insects looked like Christmas baubles when detected under a fluorescent microscope. The pollens found on these insects are gymnosperms, which is a plant category that produces seeds without flowers. Flowering plants evolved 250 million to 150 million years ago but became far more common 100 million years ago as the rise in pollinators helped transform the diversity of terrestrial life on Earth. 

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The discovery of these pollen insects was led by a team from Russia and Poland. The team concede that it is impossible to know whether their ancient insects contributed to pollination in the Permian period, but suggests that by eating pollen and covering themselves in the grains, the creatures were an “evolutionary precursor” to the mutually beneficial arrangement.  All the observations were published in the scientific journal of the Royal Society, Biology Letters.

The Permian period covers the last 47 million years of the Palaexozic era, which spans 540 million to 250 million years ago. Many insects preserved in amber date to 100 million years ago. 

Describing the first instance of discovering these fossils, Alexander Khramov, a senior researcher said it was “like touching the past”. Khramov is a researcher at the Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Science in Moscow. 

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He further said, “This discovery sheds light on the early evolution of insect pollination. It provides direct, smoking-gun evidence of pollen dispersion by Paleozoic insects. And we could say that tillyardembiids were picky eaters, specialised on a rather narrow range of host plants”. 

Tillyardembiids had wings and so were highly effective at dispersing pollen, but whether the insects co-evolved with gymnosperms as the plants’ pollinators is likely to remain a mystery. 

“We cannot go back in a time machine to observe whether these insects did pollination work or not. Even if they pollinated ancient gymnosperms all day round, there are no ways to prove it with certainty by means of palaeontology,” Khramov said.

“Who knows, maybe they simply gobbled up pollen, and plants did not benefit from it? Anyway, what we could say for sure is that tillyardembiids visited quite a narrow range of plants and carried their pollen in large amounts. So I do not see why they could not have been pollinators,” he added.

Charles Wellman, professor of palaeobiology at the University of Sheffield, said the majority of modern plants are insect pollinated. “How and when insect pollination began is a compelling question. This new fossil discovery suggests that insects had begun to steal plant pollen to eat millions of years before the process of pollination evolved. However, this eventually became an association of mutual benefit, as plants developed mechanisms to ensure that the thieves left with pollen attached, that fertilised neighbouring plants as they fed on them.”

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Barry Lomax, professor of plant palaeobiology a the University of Nottingham, said plant-insect interactions define the modern world, with pollinator services proving the backbone for much of our food production. The study, he said, provided evidence for the antiquity of the relationship, one that became established well before the evolution of flowers which likely occurred in the Cretaceous period about 135m years ago.

The exciting thing about this discovery is the fact that there appears to be a degree of specialisation in plant-insect interactions and that this specialisation predates flowering plants and it suggests the possibility that insect pollination predates flowers.

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