{"id":650772,"date":"2025-12-23T17:14:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T17:14:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/650772\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T17:14:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T17:14:18","slug":"cave-of-wonders-where-prehistoric-bees-made-nests-in-the-bones-of-animals-eaten-by-colossal-owls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/650772\/","title":{"rendered":"Cave of Wonders: Where Prehistoric Bees Made Nests in the Bones of Animals Eaten by Colossal Owls"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u2013 credit, Lazaro Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez via SWNS<\/p>\n

Burrowing bees generally prefer to make their nests in the open, but some 20,000 years ago their ancestors lived in a cave where they used the bones of prey animals rather than soft soil.<\/p>\n

The groundbreaking discovery was made in a Caribbean cave that narrowly escaped being turned into someone\u2019s toilet.<\/p>\n

The island of Hispaniola, divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is dotted with limestone caves. Evidence, including owl bones and eggshells, suggest that giant ancestors of the modern barn owl lived in the cave through many successive generations.<\/p>\n

The researchers say that the owls would sometimes cough up pellets containing the bones of their prey, which landed on the cave floor. The bees would then use the bones\u2019 empty tooth sockets as nests, according to study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.<\/p>\n

The American research team that published the study believe a lack of topsoil outside the cave and an abundance of accumulated silt within led to the anomaly.<\/p>\n

Cueva de Mono in the southern Dominican Republic is a deposit of many fossils, and the study\u2019s lead author Dr. Lazaro Vi\u00f1ola-L\u00f3pez, of the Field Museum in Chicago, repeatedly explored the cave looking for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you go in at night, you see the eyes of the tarantulas that live inside,\u201d he told the museum\u2019s press. \u201cBut once you walk down a 10 meter-long tunnel underground, you start finding the fossils.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were multiple layers of fossils, separated by carbonate layers resulting from rainy periods in the distant past. Many of the fossils belonged to rodents, but there were also bones from sloths, birds, and reptiles, amounting to more than 50 different species.<\/p>\n

Despite the scientific sensitivity and value, the team one day discovered, having studied the cave for several years, that a local had built a house near the opening and was preparing to use the cave as his septic tank.<\/p>\n

The resident\u2019s plans were thwarted, but the scientists decided they weren\u2019t going to wait around for any other wiseguys to damage the layers of paleontological history.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to go on a rescue mission and get as many fossils out as possible, and we got a lot of them,\u201d said\u00a0Dr. Vi\u00f1ola-L\u00f3pez. \u201cWe think that this was a cave where owls lived for many generations, maybe for hundreds or thousands of years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe find fossils of the animals that they ate, fossils from the owls themselves, and even some turtles and crocodiles who might have fallen into the cave.\u201d<\/p>\n

The discovery of the bees occurred when Vi\u00f1ola-L\u00f3pez, who was primarily interested in the bones from the mammals that the owls ate, noticed that in the empty tooth sockets of the mammal jaws, the sediment didn\u2019t look like it had just randomly accrued.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was like, \u2018Okay, there\u2019s something weird here.\u2019 It reminded me of the wasp nest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several years earlier, a paleontologist had shown him the ancient remains of wasp cocoons which looked a lot like smooth dirt lining the tooth sockets from the cave fossils.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u2013 credit, Lazaro Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez via SWNS<\/p>\n

To better examine the potential insect nests present in the cave fossils, Dr. Vi\u00f1ola-L\u00f3pez and his colleagues CT scanned the bones, X-raying the specimens from enough angles that they could produce 3D pictures of the compacted dirt inside the tooth sockets without destroying the fossils or disturbing the sediment.<\/p>\n

The shapes and structures of the sediment looked just like the mud nests created by some bee species today. The researchers believe that the bees mixed their saliva with dirt to make tiny individual nests for their eggs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s possible that they belonged to a species that\u2019s still alive today\u2014there\u2019s very little known about the ecology of many of the bees on these islands,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we know that a lot of the animals whose bones are preserved in the cave are now extinct, so the bees that created these nests might be from a species that has died out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vi\u00f1ola-L\u00f3pez said it\u2019s a perfect example of how bees can surprise you.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if you\u2019re looking primarily for fossils of larger, vertebrate animals, you should keep an eye out for trace fossils that can tell you about invertebrates like insects. Knowing about insects can tell you a lot about a whole ecosystem, so you have to pay attention to that part of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

SHARE This Hidden Wonder Of Extinct Ecology, Rescued, And Revealed\u2026\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2013 credit, Lazaro Vi\u00f1ola L\u00f3pez via SWNS Burrowing bees generally prefer to make their nests in the open,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[12133,30206,45654,32962,12134,3925,70,49944,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-650772","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-bees","9":"tag-discovery","10":"tag-dominican-republic","11":"tag-fossils","12":"tag-insects","13":"tag-paleontology","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-surprise","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115770010402197913","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}