Four hundred and twenty-five fossil insects. Only six of them had pollen.
No older insect has ever been found with pollen stuck to its body.
They lived beside a lagoon near the Ural Mountains, about two hundred and eighty million years ago.
This insect was shaped like an earwig, and about fifteen millimeters long.
Bodies like these sank in water, where pollen washes off easily.
Yet five still wear clumps of it on their bodies. A sixth has chewed pollen in its gut.
The clumps sit on the insects, never on the rock around them.
But that pollen came from just a few kinds of plant. In the lagoon's mud, those kinds are rare.
One kind is missing from the mud altogether. The commonest grain, about a quarter of the pollen there, never turns up on them.
So these insects were pollen eaters, with a taste for the rare kinds.
Whether they carried it on to other plants, nobody can say. They may simply have robbed them.
The next insects found wearing pollen lived about a hundred and twenty million years later. Flowers came later still.
Only six kept the evidence. Many of the others probably lost theirs in the water.
