CHICAGO: Fossilised orchid pollen on the back of a bee preserved in amber has offered the first evidence that these delicate flowers existed around the time of the dinosaurs, US researchers said on Tuesday.

Biologists at Harvard University said the ancient pollen, found in a clump on a now-extinct worker bee, means orchids are much older than previously thought.

While orchids are the largest and most diverse plant family on earth, they have been largely absent from the fossil record, said Harvard researcher Santiago Ramirez, whose study appears in the journal Nature.

The absence of orchids from the fossil record has fuelled debate over their age, with estimates ranging from 26 million to 112 million years ago.

The worker bee specimen is 15 to 20 million years old, but Ramirez and colleagues used its payload of pollen to analyse the orchid species. They used a molecular-clock method of analysis to estimate the age of the orchid family, which they date to about 80 million years ago.

The dinosaurs’ extinction occurred about 65 million years ago.

Ramirez said the find not only helps resolve a debate over the age of the orchid but it provides the first direct evidence of ancient pollination.—Reuters