112-Million-Year-Old Amber Samples Preserve a Snapshot of an Ancient Forest
The deposits from the time of the dinosaurs contain fragile insects and a spider’s web
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Researchers have discovered ancient time capsules in South America. Specifically, they found amber samples in an Ecuadorian quarry with tiny traces of a 112-million-year-old forest from the supercontinent Gondwana.
Amber is fossilized tree resin and can sometimes include bio-inclusions—preserved bits of plants or animals that provide an excellent opportunity to investigate delicate ancient life that doesn’t typically make it into the fossil record. These Ecuadorian discoveries represent the first known amber deposits in South America to feature bio-inclusions.
"Amber essentially preserves the exoskeletons of small organisms from the past. The preservation of these outer structures is so excellent that, under a microscope, they can look like freshly dead organisms, yet they are millions of years old," Xavier Delclòs, a paleoentomologist from the University of Barcelona, tells Reuters’ Will Dunham.
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In a study published yesterday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, Delclòs and colleagues found that the roughly 112-million-year-old amber samples consist of two types, one that formed underground and one that formed in contact with the air. In the aerial amber, they documented a bit of spiderweb as well as insects from orders including Diptera (flies and mosquitos), Coleoptera (beetles) and Hymenoptera (the group that includes ants and wasps). Rock samples near the amber also yielded many different plant remains, such as spores and pollen.
A person visiting the area back then would have certainly needed bug spray, “and probably also some way of escaping from a carnivorous dinosaur or two,” Delclòs says to New Scientist’s James Woodford. In fact, some of the mosquitos trapped in the amber may have sucked dinosaur blood. Unfortunately, however, any dino DNA that may have ended up in the amber via blood-sucking mosquitos would be long gone, probably due to the resins’ chemicals, he adds.
Because many amber deposits are in the Northern Hemisphere, little is known about the ecology of the Southern Hemisphere during the Cretaceous Period (66 to 145 million years ago), the last period of the dinosaur era and when the supercontinent Gondwana was still breaking apart into today’s continents. As such, the newly discovered amber “opens a new window into the forests of South America at the time of the dinosaurs, preserving creatures so small and delicate that they almost never fossilize,” Delclòs tells Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee.
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According to the researchers, the bio-inclusions and other remains indicate that the amber originated in a humid and diverse forest in the southern part of Gondwana with many resin-producing trees. The recently discovered amber also dates back to an era when flowering plants and insects started their successful partnership, Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a paleoentomologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History who did not participate in the study, points out to the Associated Press’ Christina Larson. As a result, the sample may potentially shed light on how flowering plants and insects developed together alongside the dinosaurs.
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