“We examined hundreds, even thousands, of fossil flowers and insects for pollen in the hope of gaining insight into the evolution of flowers, flower visitors and pollination,” said Dr. Friðgeir Grímsson, a researcher at the University of Vienna. Some of the flowers examined came from the linden tree, and numerous bumblebees had visited linden flowers before they drowned in a former volcanic crater lake and fossilized. “The newly-discovered linden flowers were named Tilia magnasepala,” said Christian Geier, a doctoral student at the University of Vienna. “Tilia magnasepala flowers are the first of their kind from the European continent to be recorded and described according to palynological criteria — i.e. 24 million years of pollination interaction between European linden flowers and bumble bees.