In a recently published study, Scientists described 112-million-year-old amber from an open sandstone pit in Ecuador’s Napo Province in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The Genoveva quarry, long worked by local miners, yielded two kinds of fossil resin: root amber, which formed underground and rarely contains fossils, and aerial amber that dripped from trunks and branches and preserved insects and spider silk.
For South America, the find marked the first record of Mesozoic amber holding multiple organisms, a feature previously known only from Northern Hemisphere sites such as France and Myanmar, the Associated Press reported.
Led by University of Barcelona geologist Xavier Delclòs, the team examined 60 amber pieces and the surrounding sandstone. Geochemistry showed the material belonged to the Hollín Formation inside the Oriente Basin, an area that today supplies much of Ecuador’s oil. Petroleum seepage altered some pieces, so researchers applied additional chemical steps before studying the inclusions.
Aerial amber fragments held at least twenty-one fossils: flies, beetles, primitive ants, extinct wasps, true bugs, caddisflies, and fragments of a spider web. “Amber pieces are little windows into the past,” said Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a paleoentomologist at the University of Oxford Museum of Natural History, according to AP. “It’s the time when the relationship between flowering plants and insects got started,” he added, calling that alliance “one of the most successful partnerships in nature.”
Pollen, spores, and leaf fragments in the quarry suggested a humid Cretaceous forest dominated by resin-producing conifers related to modern Araucaria, with an understorey of ferns, cycads, and some of the earliest flowering-plant leaves recorded in north-western South America. “It was a different kind of forest,” said Fabiany Herrera, a Field Museum paleobotanist, AP reported.
Aquatic insects such as caddisflies and mosquitoes indicated nearby rivers and wetlands. Some midges belonged to families whose larvae often feed on blood, prompting speculation that dinosaurs roamed the forest.
Delclòs said the Genoveva deposit was the largest Cretaceous amber site found in the Southern Hemisphere and contained blocks of root amber up to 40 centimeters wide, according to Gizmodo. “The discovery 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,” he said, adding that “the Jurassic Park dream remains science fiction.”
Co-author Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute first visited the locality a decade ago after spotting a brief reference in field notes. “I went there and realized that this place is incredible. There is so much amber in the mines,” he recalled, AP reported.
Fellow author Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer of the Senckenberg Museum predicted that continued digging in the Oriente Basin could uncover thousands more pieces, eventually letting scientists compare South American mid-Cretaceous communities with those known from Australia, Antarctica, and South Africa. Delclòs wrote in the study that the new trove “offers valuable information about an area for which we had very little data until now.”
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.