{"id":199040,"date":"2015-08-13T13:14:02","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T16:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=199040"},"modified":"2015-10-06T13:20:41","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T16:20:41","slug":"100-million-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/100-million-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"100 million years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_193540\" style=\"max-width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-193540\" src=\"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Tecnociencia_moscas-que-polinizaram-plantas-no-cret\u00e1ceo-e1439227097131-300x212.jpg\" alt=\"Rarities: insects like the one below sucked the nectar from flowerless plants\" width=\"290\" height=\"205\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span class=\"media-credits-inline\">Universidade de Barcelona<\/span>Rarities: insects like the one below sucked the nectar from flowerless plants<span class=\"media-credits\">Universidade de Barcelona<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<p>Insects preserved in amber discovered in a cave known as El Soplao in the north of Spain have shown how plant fertilization occurred in the Cretaceous Period, about 105 million years ago.\u00a0 Back then, pollinating insects more commonly found today, like bees and butterflies, did not yet exist, and most plants were flowerless gymnosperms (<em><i>Current Biology<\/i><\/em>, July 20, 2015).\u00a0 The samples of amber found by researchers from Spain and the United States contained perfectly preserved specimens representing two different species of now-extinct insects.<\/p>\n<p>Both had a long proboscis (a kind of trunk, like an elephant\u2019s) that served to absorb nectar from the reproductive structures of plants while in full flight, similarly to how modern hummingbirds feed.\u00a0 Both species of insects belong to the family Zhangsolvidae, whose representatives were previously known only from fossils collected in China and Brazil.\u00a0 One of the insect species carried thousands of grains of pollen from an already extinct gymnosperm, indicating that other long-proboscid insects may have acted as pollinators.\u00a0 The work is the result of collaboration between experts from Spain \u2013 from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME), University of Barcelona, and Complutense University of Madrid \u2013 and the United States (Universities of Harvard and Cornell, and the American Museum of National History, in New York).\u00a0 In the Cretaceous, gymnosperms such as pines dominated the terrestrial landscape and the main pollinating agent was the wind \u2013 or so it was once thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Insects shows how plant fertilization occurred about 105 million years ago ","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[168],"tags":[231],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-199040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technoscience","tag-evolution"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199040"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=199040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}