Preserved in Amber

An international team of scientists has discovered the first pieces of fossil-bearing amber--preserving an exceptional diversity of insect, arachnid, and plant species--in the western Amazonian basin.

Amber preserves delicate plant structures, soft-bodied animals, and microbes better than sediments, but even conventional fossils of most groups of animals living today are virtually unknown from the Amazon basin. Prior to discovery of this amber, little has been known about the history and evolution of land-dwelling insects, arachnids, and microbes living in the past 65 million years in South America.

The amber finding provides the first evidence that a great number of insect and spider species lived in this region and populated tropical equatorial environments during the middle Miocene Epoch, about 15 million years ago.

Until now, fossil-bearing amber in South America has only been reported in Patagonia, eastern Brazil, and French Guyana. The new amber preserves a wide array of organisms, including insects, arachnids, algae, pollen, fungi, bacteria, and spores from more than 30 types of fungi and plants. Many of the spore forms and all of the arthropods (a group that includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans) appear to be new to science.

--LiveScience Staff

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Credit: American Museum of Natural History