The finding of a95 million year old amber deposithas enabled an international team of 20 scientistsidentify some of the insects and plants that lived with dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. From the data obtained, the researchers describe today in an article published in the journalPNAS how could they bethe ancient tropical forests that grew in present-day Ethiopia at the time of the great reptiles.
“Thefirst angiosperms, or flowering plants, appeared and diversified in the Cretaceous, “explains Alexander Schmidt, from the University of Göttingen in Germany, who has identified that amber closely resembles that of a group of New World plants calledHymenaea, formed by large trees that reach a height of 15 to 50 meters and with whose resin varnish is made.
Caught in theamber, which forms when plant resin fossilizes, scientists have also foundthe oldest known records of many arthropods, including wasps, moths, beetles, an ant, and a rare insect belonging to the Zoraptera family, small arthropods less than 3 millimeters in size. In addition to parasitic fungi that feed on tree resin and some bacteria.
“Until now, virtually no Cretaceous amber deposits have been found from the supercontinent Gondwana in thesouthern hemisphere“, clarifies Paul Nascimbene, of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology of the American Museum of Natural Sciences and one of the authors of the article.” The most important deposits of that time had appeared in North America and Eurasia.
