More than 5,000 years ago, new fossil research suggests that burrowing bees made a home among piles of rodent bones buried in caves on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is part of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The bees encountered the bones while digging in the soil to their desired depth. Researchers stopped to build their nests inside the cavities of their teeth and vertebrae, and found that the nests were the perfect size. Most of the bones the scientists recovered belonged to the hutia, a thick rodent that resembles a cross between a squirrel and a beaver, but a few belonged to an extinct species of sloth.
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“Cells of Osnidum almontei” [the name given to the fossilized nests] “It appears to be highly opportunistic, filling all available bone chambers with sediment deposits,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The researchers hypothesized that the bees found Huthia’s bones long after the Hispanio barn owl (Tyto ostologa) had deposited them in the cave. Evidence suggests that these now-extinct owls sometimes carried whole khthia into caves, discarding the bones as they devoured rodents, or regurgitated pellets containing the remains of the khthia they had eaten while hunting. Barn owl bones found in the cave indicate that barn owls lived there, the researchers said.
These piles of bones were buried over time as sediment flowed into the cave from the outside. Research shows that although burrowing bees typically nest outdoors, several generations of burrowing bees did not take advantage of this until much later.
The researchers found six wasp nests inside one tooth cavity, indicating that successive generations nested in the same location after the previous nest was abandoned.
The bees may have chosen to nest inside the cave rather than outside because there was little soil in the surrounding landscape to burrow into. “The area we were sampling from is karst, made of sharp limestone, and all natural soil has been lost,” study co-author Mitchell Riegler, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, said in a statement.
After one of the scientists last visited the cave, plans had been submitted to convert it into a septic tank facility.
“We had to go on a rescue mission and extract as many fossils as possible,” study lead author Lázaro Vignola López, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said in a statement.
Plans to build a septic tank ultimately failed, but scientists still removed a large number of fossils. These fossils have not yet been analyzed, and the research team plans to publish further research on their findings.
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