The Oldest Amber Ever Found!

Publication Info:

Transcript:

Cihang Lu et al. 2026. The earliest amber from the Middle Devonian of China. Science Advances 12 (29); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh1266

Not all amber is full of mosquitos and dinosaur blood like it is in Jurassic Park, some is just full of the answers paleontologists have been looking for.Brand new amber samples were just recovered from a surprising deposit in China. This ancient plant resin will be changing everything paleontologists know about resin production in our planet's earliest plants.

Episode 312

Notes:

Do you know what this fossil is? Or what about now? You're probably a little more used to seeing it like this. Uh and do you know how old it can be? So, this is amber. I mean, technically, this isn't. This is a resin prop. But, amber's usually fossilized tree sap. It can also be plant resin, different resin, but plant resin. And most of the time now when people think about it, they're thinking about it having bugs with dinosaur blood inside them. So, between 66 and 250 million years ago. And obviously, resin from flowering trees can only be a little over 100 million years old. And conifers are a little over 300 million years old. So, you're probably thinking that's getting somewhere close to the maximum age for amber. But, thanks to some brand new finds, it looks like amber is actually preceding all seed plants. Paleontologists collected 241 samples of this amber ranging anywhere from 0.1 to 0.5 mm. And at first glance, it looks fairly normal. It ranges anywhere from like pale yellow to dark orangish brown, which is what you'd expect. But, what's special about it is that it came from a middle Devonian deposit that's 385 million years old. Preceding angiosperms like flowering trees, gymnosperms like conifers, and pteridosperms like seed ferns. Meaning that the mechanisms to create resin go back further than anybody knew. This is probably the first evidence of resin in an entirely different group of plants called the progymnosperms. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.