Amber gives glimpse into life 50m years ago

The fossilised resin holds insects that survived the dinosaurs. Photo / David Grimaldi, AMNH

A collection of beautifully preserved bees, ants, spiders and other small prehistoric creatures that lived 50 million years ago have been unearthed in a huge amber deposit in India.

Scientists said the fossilised globules of tree resin have entombed a spectacular menagerie of insects that had survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and were living at a time before mammals had evolved.

The amber deposit is the first to be found in India and may be larger than the Baltic deposits in Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Germany, which are the biggest in the world and have proved a rich source of the semi-precious gemstone for more than 200 years.

Amber forms when the sap of trees solidifies into hard lumps of resin which, when buried, become fossilised into a substance valued for its colour, translucence and natural organic beauty.

The tree resin has antiseptic properties to protect the plant against attack from fungi and bacteria, a feature which helps preserve any insects or small animals that become trapped in the resin before it solidifies.

The new deposits, which the scientists have likened to a huge cache of herbal cough drops, were found in the open-cast coal mines of the Cambay region of northwest India.

Researchers said an analysis of the amber shows it was formed from the resin of a family of tropical hardwood trees that still exist in Southeast Asia.

Insects found in Baltic amber are often empty shells because their inner, soft parts have dissolved. However, scientists have found that the Indian amber preserves the insects intact.

"We are able to dissolve the amber and get the specimens completely out," said Professor Jes Rust of Bonn University in Germany, who led the team.

"This is really outstanding. It's like getting a complete dinosaur out of the amber and being able to put it under the microscope," Rust said.

The story of a prehistoric mosquito that had just dined on the blood of a dinosaur before being trapped in tree resin formed part of the 1993 film Jurassic Park, based on the book by Michael Crichton, where dinosaur DNA is recovered from the insect and used to bring the giant creatures back to life.

However, Rust said the possibility of getting any genetic material from the trapped insects is next to zero.

"You will never find ancient DNA in amber. It is completely destroyed and deteriorates after a couple of hundred thousand years. Jurassic Park is wonderful science fiction," he said.

The scientists have already found more than 700 specimens in the amber. They include ants, bees, termites, spiders, mites and parts of plants.

Dating of the coal seams, where the amber was recovered, shows the animals lived between 50 and 52 million years ago, when the Indian subcontinent was an island that was moving towards Asia, before colliding with the continent to form the Himalayas.

Already, the scientists have shown that the similarities of the species in the amber to species living in Asia and Europe have exploded a theory known as the "biotic island ferry", where India was thought to have carried much of its wildlife to Asia.

"What we found in this 52-million-year-old amber is that the insects contained in it already show close connections to European fauna of almost the same time.

Indian scientist Ashok Sahni from the University of Lucknow found the amber. "He was digging for mammoth fossils and he came across these strange stones which be brought to Germany to show me because there were no amber specialists in India," Rust said.

- INDEPENDENT