Katarina Zimmer

This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
In the summers of 2018 and 2019, the ecologist James Ryalls and his colleagues would go out to a field near Reading, in southern England, to stare at the insects buzzing around black-mustard plants. Each time a bee, a hoverfly, a moth, a butterfly, or another insect tried to get at the pollen or nectar in the small yellow flowers, the scientists would make a note.
It was part of an unusual experiment.

This article was originally published in Undark Magazine.It could have been a scene from Jurassic Park: 10 golden lumps of hardened resin, each encasing insects. But these weren’t from the age of the dinosaurs; these younger resins were formed in eastern Africa within the past few hundreds or thousands of years. Still, they offered a glimpse into a lost past: the dry evergreen forests of coastal Tanzania.