385-Million-Year-Old Amber Found in China

Paleontologists in China have discovered what they say is the earliest confirmed pieces of amber ever found, a fossilized resin roughly 385 million years old (Middle Devonian epoch) that predates the previous record-holder by about 65 million years. The discovery also suggests that resin production evolved in plants well before seed plants existed. “Amber, specifically fossilized resin, is thought to be one of the ancient exudates of seed plants,” said Dr. Cihang Luo, a researcher with the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and colleagues.

“Seed plants usually secrete resin through specialized secretory tissues of plant surfaces or, on a larger scale, via their internal secretory systems associated with bark and wood.” “These resins, which are complex mixtures of primarily terpenoid and/or phenolic compounds, help plants recover from various biotic and abiotic injuries, including those from pests, microbial pathogens, and wildfires.” “Secreted resin hardens and transforms into amber during diagenetic and catagenetic processes, under elevated temperatures and pressures.”

“The viscous resin sometimes traps organisms, which are subsequently preserved as fossil inclusions within amber, providing critical information on the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems.” In their research, Dr. Luo and co-

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authors analyzed about 10 kg of coal collected from a coal seam in the Hujiersite Formation near Hoxtolgay in China’s Xinjiang region. Using ultraviolet light, they located small clusters of amber embedded within the coal and ultimately extracted 241 tiny pieces — most measuring just 0.1 to 0.5 mm across — by hand under a microscope. Most of the amber is translucent to opaque and ranges from pale yellow to dark brown. Some pieces contain bubbles, and the fossils fluoresce bright blue under ultraviolet light. The amber-bearing layer in the Hujiersite Formation is Middle Devonian, approximately 385 million years old. Until now, the oldest definitively verified amber came from the Late Carboniferous, about 320 million years ago. “Although amber is a unique repository of environmental, diagenetic, and biological data, its occurrence is not continuous through Earth history,” the...

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