Insects pollinated the first flower 140M years ago, and it wasn’t a bee
If evolutionary biologists are the detectives of the natural world’s past mysteries, then the phylogenic tree is their version of a cork board of crime-scene suspects linked together with red string and thumbtacks.And the latest revelations out of this form of biological investigative work is that an insect, but not a bee, that transported the very first package of pollen to another plant some 140 million years ago, kicking off the propagation of flora that has spawned around 400,000 species now occupying nearly 90% of…