What it is
A slim insect about fifteen millimeters long, shaped a little like an earwig, with short legs, long antennae and long tail threads. It lived in the early Permian beside a lagoon near what are now the Ural Mountains in Russia, at a fossil site called Chekarda. It is one of the commonest insects there, about one in twenty of all the insect fossils.
The pollen
Scientists checked 425 fossils of Tillyardembia. Five carry clumps of pollen on the head, thorax or belly, and a sixth has chewed, half-digested pollen near the tip of its abdomen. The pollen sits on the insects and never on the stone around them. No older insect has been found with pollen stuck to its body: the next ones are about 120 million years younger.
A picky eater
Its pollen came from a few kinds of plant that were rare around the lagoon. One kind it carried is missing from the lagoon's pollen record altogether, and the commonest grains there never turn up on these insects. Dense rows of hairs on its belly may have helped the pollen stick.