Whether you discover them yourself on a beach, or merely gawp at them behind glass in a museum, there is a certain wonder when it comes to fossils.

So much of what we know about our past, about evolution, and about the species that came before us comes from our examination of fossils – and, of course, these highly compressed remains tell the story of millions of years of life on Earth.

But when we think of fossils, we usually think of spiral shells, or else dinosaur bones.

A truly unique fossil, recently uncovered in New Zealand, however, has captured the hearts of and minds of experts (and regular folk too).

And for good reason.

On the South Island of New Zealand, a spectacular hotspot for fossils is the township of Outram. This area is known as a prolific source of fossils for a very good reason.

There are four volcanoes there.

When volcanoes erupt (particularly in the past, when the creatures who roamed the Earth didn’t have warning systems or methods of evacuation like the ones we have now), lava, flowing mud, and ash quickly bury any creature in their path.

Unlike a typical animal death, those who have been captured by the flow of a volcano are rapidly heated and inaccessible to other creatures who may scavenge their remains or otherwise break them down as part of the planet’s natural cycles.

Thus the body of the creature becomes fossilised inside the rock that the volcano’s lava or ash flow caused.

Millions of years later, when researchers open up that rock, their fossilised remains can be found.

And for a New Zealand research team, one fossil was more spectacular than any other.

Because what they discovered in the rock of this area, was a small, female bee – giving the researchers immediate knowledge of the sheer amount of time (over 14 million years) that our fuzzy, buzzy friend has been present in the country.

As the research team wrote in their paper, which was recently published in the journal Zoosystema, the presence of this bee species – Leioproctus (Otagocolletes) barrydonovani – in the mudstone tells us a lot about how insect species adapted to New Zealand’s unique environment:

“Some insect lineages have clearly thrived and evolved unique features within New Zealand, but many are conspicuously and enigmatically depauperate given the complexity and scale of the landscape, seemingly reflecting their late arrival to the islands.”

Though, right now, they can only speculate as to the bee species’ adaptations – as well as whether other species pollinated the island alongside them – their findings have shed more light on just how unique the flora and fauna of the country is, and just how long it has been so.

And, with its iridescent wings still shining, this bee surely wins the award for world’s most charming fossil.

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