A team of researchers from Uppsala University have uncovered a hidden diversity of microscopic animal fossils from over half a billion years ago lurking in rocks from the northern tip of Greenland.

The Cambrian explosion of animal diversity beginning ~541 million years ago is a defining episode in the history of life. This was a time when the seas first teemed with animal life, and the first recognisably modern ecosystems began to take shape.

Current accounts of this explosion in animal diversity rely heavily on records from fossilised shells and other hard parts, since these structures are the most likely to survive as fossils.

However, since most marine animals are soft-bodied this represents only a small fraction of the total diversity.

Rare sites of exceptional fossilisation, like the world-famous Burgess Shale, have revolutionised palaeontologists understanding of soft-bodied Cambrian life. Because of the special conditions of fossilisation at these localities, organisms that did not produce hard mineralized shells or skeletons are also preserved. Such sites offer a rare glimpse into the true diversity of these ancient seas, which were filled with a dazzling array of soft and squishy predatory worms and arthropods (the group containing modern crustaceans and insects).

One of the oldest of these truly exceptional fossil bonanzas is the Sirius Passet site in the far north of Greenland. Unfortunately, during their long history, the rocks at Sirius Passet have been heated up and baked to high temperatures as the northern margin of Greenland smashed into various tectonic plates and buried these rocks deep beneath the surface.

All this heating has boiled away the delicate organic remains that once formed the fossils of soft bodied animals at Sirius Passet, leaving only faint impressions of their remains.

Not far to the south of Sirius Passet, the rocks have escaped the worst effects of this heating. A team of palaeontologists from Uppsala (Ben Slater, Sebastian Willman, Graham Budd and John Peel) used a low-manipulation acid extraction procedure to dissolve some of these less intensively cooked mudrocks. To their astonishment, this simple preparation technique revealed a wealth of previously unknown microscopic animal fossils preserved in spectacular detail.

Most of the fossils were less than a millimetre long and had to be studied under the microscope. Fossils at the nearby Sirius Passet site typically preserve much larger animals, so the new finds fill an important gap in our knowledge of the small-scale animals that probably made up the majority of these ecosystems. Among the discoveries were the tiny spines and teeth of priapulid worms – small hook shaped structures that allowed these worms to efficiently burrow through the sediments and capture prey. Other finds included the tough outer cuticles and defensive spines of various arthropods, and perhaps most surprisingly, microscopic fragments of the oldest known pterobranch hemichordates – an obscure group of tube-dwelling filter feeders that are distant relatives of the vertebrates. This group became very diverse after the Cambrian Period and are among some of the most commonly found fossils in rocks from younger deposits, but were entirely unknown from the early Cambrian. This new source of fossils will also help palaeontologists to better understand the famously difficult to interpret fossils at the nearby Sirius Passet site, where the flattened animal fossils are usually complete, but missing crucial microscopic details.

“The sheer abundance of these miniature animal fossils means that we have only begun to scratch the surface of this overlooked resource, but it is already clear that this discovery will help to reshape our view of the non-shelly animals that crawled and swam among the early Cambrian seas more than half a billion years ago,” says Sebastian Willman, researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University.

Reference:
Ben J. Slater et al. Widespread preservation of small carbonaceous fossils (SCFs) in the early Cambrian of North Greenland, Geology (2017). DOI: 10.1130/G39788.1

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Uppsala University.

Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.

The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by J. William Schopf, professor of paleobiology at UCLA, and John W. Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The research relied on new technology and scientific expertise developed by researchers in the UW-Madison WiscSIMS Laboratory.

The study describes 11 microbial specimens from five separate taxa, linking their morphologies to chemical signatures that are characteristic of life. Some represent now-extinct bacteria and microbes from a domain of life called Archaea, while others are similar to microbial species still found today. The findings also suggest how each may have survived on an oxygen-free planet.

The microfossils—so called because they are not evident to the naked eye—were first described in the journal Science in 1993 by Schopf and his team, which identified them based largely on the fossils’ unique, cylindrical and filamentous shapes. Schopf, director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, published further supporting evidence of their biological identities in 2002.

He collected the rock in which the fossils were found in 1982 from the Apex chert deposit of Western Australia, one of the few places on the planet where geological evidence of early Earth has been preserved, largely because it has not been subjected to geological processes that would have altered it, like burial and extreme heating due to plate-tectonic activity.

But Schopf’s earlier interpretations have been disputed. Critics argued they are just odd minerals that only look like biological specimens. However, Valley says, the new findings put these doubts to rest; the microfossils are indeed biological.

“I think it’s settled,” he says.

Using a secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) at UW-Madison called IMS 1280—one of just a handful of such instruments in the world—Valley and his team, including department geoscientists Kouki Kitajima and Michael Spicuzza, were able to separate the carbon composing each fossil into its constituent isotopes and measure their ratios.

Isotopes are different versions of the same chemical element that vary in their masses. Different organic substances—whether in rock, microbe or animal—contain characteristic ratios of their stable carbon isotopes.

Using SIMS, Valley’s team was able to tease apart the carbon-12 from the carbon-13 within each fossil and measure the ratio of the two compared to a known carbon isotope standard and a fossil-less section of the rock in which they were found.

“The differences in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” Valley says. “If they’re not biological there is no reason for such a correlation. Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”

Based on this information, the researchers were also able to assign identities and likely physiological behaviors to the fossils locked inside the rock, Valley says. The results show that “these are a primitive, but diverse group of organisms,” says Schopf.

The team identified a complex group of microbes: phototrophic bacteria that would have relied on the sun to produce energy, Archaea that produced methane, and gammaproteobacteria that consumed methane, a gas believed to be an important constituent of Earth’s early atmosphere before oxygen was present.

It took Valley’s team nearly 10 years to develop the processes to accurately analyze the microfossils—fossils this old and rare have never been subjected to SIMS analysis before. The study builds on earlier achievements at WiscSIMS to modify the SIMS instrument, to develop protocols for sample preparation and analysis, and to calibrate necessary standards to match as closely as possible the hydrocarbon content to the samples of interest.

In preparation for SIMS analysis, the team needed to painstakingly grind the original sample down as slowly as possible to expose the delicate fossils themselves—all suspended at different levels within the rock and encased in a hard layer of quartz—without actually destroying them. Spicuzza describes making countless trips up and down the stairs in the department as geoscience technician Brian Hess ground and polished each microfossil in the sample, one micrometer at a time.

Each microfossil is about 10 micrometers wide; eight of them could fit along the width of a human hair.

Valley and Schopf are part of the Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium, funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which exists to study and understand the origins, the future and the nature of life on Earth and throughout the universe.

Studies such as this one, Schopf says, indicate life could be common throughout the universe. But importantly, here on Earth, because several different types of microbes were shown to be already present by 3.5 billion years ago, it tells us that “life had to have begun substantially earlier—nobody knows how much earlier—and confirms it is not difficult for primitive life to form and to evolve into more advanced microorganisms,” says Schopf.

Earlier studies by Valley and his team, dating to 2001, have shown that liquid water oceans existed on Earth as early as 4.3 billion years ago, more than 800 million years before the fossils of the present study would have been alive, and just 250 million years after the Earth formed.

“We have no direct evidence that life existed 4.3 billion years ago but there is no reason why it couldn’t have,” says Valley. “This is something we all would like to find out.”

UW-Madison has a legacy of pushing back the accepted dates of early life on Earth. In 1953, the late Stanley Tyler, a geologist at the university who passed away in 1963 at the age of 57, was the first person to discover microfossils in Precambrian rocks. This pushed the origins of life back more than a billion years, from 540 million to 1.8 billion years ago.

“People are really interested in when life on Earth first emerged,” Valley says. “This study was 10 times more time-consuming and more difficult than I first imagined, but it came to fruition because of many dedicated people who have been excited about this since day one … I think a lot more microfossil analyses will be made on samples of Earth and possibly from other planetary bodies.”

Reference:
J. William Schopf el al., “SIMS analyses of the oldest known assemblage of microfossils document their taxon-correlated carbon isotope compositions,” PNAS (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1718063115

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A new analysis of the oldest known fossil microorganisms provides strong evidence to support an increasingly widespread understanding that life in the universe is common.

The microorganisms, from Western Australia, are 3.465 billion years old. Scientists from UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that two of the species they studied appear to have performed a primitive form of photosynthesis, another apparently produced methane gas, and two others appear to have consumed methane and used it to build their cell walls.

The evidence that a diverse group of organisms had already evolved extremely early in the Earth’s history — combined with scientists’ knowledge of the vast number of stars in the universe and the growing understanding that planets orbit so many of them — strengthens the case for life existing elsewhere in the universe because it would be extremely unlikely that life formed quickly on Earth but did not arise anywhere else.

“By 3.465 billion years ago, life was already diverse on Earth; that’s clear — primitive photosynthesizers, methane producers, methane users,” said J. William Schopf, a professor of paleobiology in the UCLA College, and the study’s lead author. “These are the first data that show the very diverse organisms at that time in Earth’s history, and our previous research has shown that there were sulfur users 3.4 billion years ago as well.

“This tells us life had to have begun substantially earlier and it confirms that it was not difficult for primitive life to form and to evolve into more advanced microorganisms.”

Schopf said scientists still do not know how much earlier life might have begun.

“But, if the conditions are right, it looks like life in the universe should be widespread,” he said.

The study is the most detailed ever conducted on microorganisms preserved in such ancient fossils. Researchers led by Schopf first described the fossils in the journal Science in 1993, and then substantiated their biological origin in the journal Nature in 2002. But the new study is the first to establish what kind of biological microbial organisms they are, and how advanced or primitive they are.

For the new research, Schopf and his colleagues analyzed the microorganisms with cutting-edge technology called secondary ion mass spectroscopy, or SIMS, which reveals the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 isotopes — information scientists can use to determine how the microorganisms lived. (Photosynthetic bacteria have different carbon signatures from methane producers and consumers, for example.) In 2000, Schopf became the first scientist to use SIMS to analyze microscopic fossils preserved in rocks; he said the technology will likely be used to study samples brought back from Mars for signs of life.

The Wisconsin researchers, led by geoscience professor John Valley, used a secondary ion mass spectrometer — one of just a few in the world — to separate the carbon from each fossil into its constituent isotopes and determine their ratios.

“The differences in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” Valley said. “Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”

The fossils were formed at a time when there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere, Schopf said. He thinks that advanced photosynthesis had not yet evolved, and that oxygen first appeared on Earth approximately half a billion years later before its concentration in our atmosphere increased rapidly starting about 2 billion years ago.

Oxygen would have been poisonous to these microorganisms, and would have killed them, he said.

Primitive photosynthesizers are fairly rare on Earth today because they exist only in places where there is light but no oxygen — normally there is abundant oxygen anywhere there is light. And the existence of the rocks the scientists analyzed is also rather remarkable: The average lifetime of a rock exposed on the surface of the Earth is about 200 million years, Schopf said, adding that when he began his career, there was no fossil evidence of life dating back farther than 500 million years ago.

“The rocks we studied are about as far back as rocks go.”

While the study strongly suggests the presence of primitive life forms throughout the universe, Schopf said the presence of more advanced life is very possible but less certain.

One of the paper’s co-authors is Anatoliy Kudryavtsev, a senior scientist at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, of which Schopf is director. The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

In May 2017, a paper in PNAS by Schopf, UCLA graduate student Amanda Garcia and colleagues in Japan showed the Earth’s near-surface ocean temperature has dramatically decreased over the past 3.5 billion years. The work was based on their analysis of a type of ancient enzyme present in virtually all organisms.

In, 2015 Schopf was part of an international team of scientists that described in PNAS their discovery of the greatest absence of evolution ever reported — a type of deep-sea microorganism that appears not to have evolved over more than 2 billion years.

Reference:
J. William Schopf, Kouki Kitajima, Michael J. Spicuzza, Anatoliy B. Kudryavtsev, John W. Valley. SIMS analyses of the oldest known assemblage of microfossils document their taxon-correlated carbon isotope compositions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; 201718063 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1718063115

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of California – Los Angeles.

Researchers from the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County have identified remains of a 3.5-million-year-old bear from a fossil-rich site in Canada’s High Arctic. Their study shows not only that the animal is a close relative of the ancestor of modern bears — tracing its ancestry to extinct bears of similar age from East Asia — but that it also had a sweet tooth, as determined by cavities in the teeth.

The scientists identify the bear as Protarctos abstrusus, which was previously only known from a tooth found in Idaho. Showing its transitional nature, the animal was slightly smaller than a modern black bear, with a flatter head and a combination of primitive and advanced dental characters. The results are published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

“This is evidence of the most northerly record for primitive bears, and provides an idea of what the ancestor of modern bears may have looked like,” says Dr. Xiaoming Wang, lead author of the study and Head of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA). “Just as interesting is the presence of dental caries, showing that oral infections have a long evolutionary history in the animals, which can tell us about their sugary diet, presumably from berries. This is the first and earliest documented occurrence of high-calorie diet in basal bears, likely related to fat storage in preparation for the harsh Arctic winters.”

The research team, which included co-author Dr. Natalia Rybczynski, a Research Associate and paleontologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature, were able to study recovered bones from the skull, jaws and teeth, as well as parts of the skeleton from two individuals.

The bones were discovered over a 20-year period by Canadian Museum of Nature scientists, including Dr. Rybczynski, at a fossil locality on Ellesmere Island known as the Beaver Pond site. The peat deposits include fossilized plants indicative of a boreal-type wetland forest, and have yielded other fossils, including fish, beaver, small carnivores, deerlets, and a three-toed horse.

The findings show that the Ellesmere Protarctos lived in a northern boreal-type forest habitat, where there would have been 24-hour darkness in winter, as well as about six months of ice and snow.

“It is a significant find, in part because all other ancient fossil ursine bears, and even some modern bear species like the sloth bear and sun bear, are associated with lower-latitude, milder habitats,” says co-author Dr. Rybczynski. “So, the Ellesmere bear is important because it suggests that the capacity to exploit the harshest, most northern forests on the planet is not an innovation of modern grizzlies and black bears, but may have characterized the ursine lineage from its beginning.”

Dr. Wang analyzed characteristics of fossil bear remains from around the world to identify the Ellesmere remains as Protarctos and to establish its evolutionary lineage in relation to other bears. Modern bears are wide-ranging, found from equatorial to polar regions. Their ancestors, mainly found in Eurasia, date to about 5 million years ago.

Fossil records of ursine bears (all living bears plus their ancestors, except the giant panda, which is an early offshoot) are poor and their early evolution controversial. The new fossil represents one of the early immigrations from Asia to North America but it is probably not a direct ancestor to the modern American black bear.

Of further significance is that the teeth of both Protarctos individuals show signs of well-developed dental cavities, which were identified following CT scans by Stuart White, a retired professor with the UCLA School of Dentistry. The cavities underline that these ancient bears consumed large amounts of sugary foods such as berries. Indeed, berry plants are found preserved in the same Ellesmere deposits as the bear remains.

“We know that modern bears consume sugary fruits in the fall to promote fat accumulation that allows for winter survival via hibernation. The dental cavities in Protarctos suggest that consumption of sugar-rich foods like berries, in preparation for winter hibernation, developed early in the evolution of bears as a survival strategy,” explains Rybczynski.

Reference:
Xiaoming Wang, Natalia Rybczynski, C. Richard Harington, Stuart C. White, Richard H. Tedford. A basal ursine bear (Protarctos abstrusus) from the Pliocene High Arctic reveals Eurasian affinities and a diet rich in fermentable sugars. Scientific Reports, 2017; 7 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-17657-8

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Fossils from New Zealand have revealed a giant penguin that was as big as a grown man, roughly the size of the captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

The creature was slightly shorter in length and about 20 pounds (9 kilograms) heavier than the official stats for hockey star Sidney Crosby. It measured nearly 5 feet, 10 inches (1.77 meters) long when swimming and weighed in at 223 pounds (101 kilograms).

If the penguin and the Penguin faced off on the ice, however, things would look different. When standing, the ancient bird was maybe only 5-foot-3 (1.6 meters).

The newly found bird is about 7 inches (18 centimeters) longer than any other ancient penguin that has left a substantial portion of a skeleton, said Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. A potentially bigger rival is known only from a fragment of leg bone, making a size estimate difficult.

The biggest penguin today, the emperor in Antarctica, stands less than 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall.

Mayr and others describe the giant creature in a paper released Tuesday by the journal Nature Communications. They named it Kumimanu biceae, which refers to Maori words for a large mythological monster and a bird, and the mother of one of the study’s authors. The fossils are 56 million to 60 million years old.

That’s nearly as old as the very earliest known penguin fossils, which were much smaller, said Daniel Ksepka, curator at the Bruce Museum of Greenwich, Connecticut. He has studied New Zealand fossil penguins but didn’t participate in the new study.

The new discovery shows penguins “got big very rapidly” after the mass extinction of 66 million years ago that’s best known for killing off the dinosaurs, he wrote in an email.

That event played a big role in penguin history. Beforehand, a non-flying seabird would be threatened by big marine reptile predators, which also would compete with the birds for food. But once the extinction wiped out those reptiles, the ability to fly was not so crucial, opening the door for penguins to appear.

Birds often evolve toward larger sizes after they lose the ability to fly, Mayr said. In fact, the new paper concludes that big size appeared more than once within the penguin family tree.

What happened to the giants?

Mayr said researchers believe they died out when large marine mammals like toothed whales and seals showed up and provided competition for safe breeding places and food. The newcomers may also have hunted the big penguins, he said.

Reference:
Gerald Mayr et al. A Paleocene penguin from New Zealand substantiates multiple origins of gigantism in fossil Sphenisciformes, Nature Communications (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01959-6

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by The Associated Press.

Everyone wants to be with their family over the holidays, but spare a thought for a group of orphan fossils that have been separated from their parents since the dawn of animal evolution, over half a billion years ago.

For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over the microscopic fossils of Pseudooides, which are smaller than sand grains.

The resemblance of the fossils to animal embryos inspired their name, which means ‘false egg’.

The fossils preserve stages of embryonic development frozen in time by miraculous processes of fossilisation, which turned their squishy cells into stone.

Pseudooides fossils have a segmented middle like the embryos of segmented animals, such as insects, inspiring grand theories on how complex segmented animals may have evolved.

A team of paleontologists from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences and Peking University have now peered inside the Pseudooides embryos using X-rays and found features that link them to the adult stages of another fossil group.

It turns out that these adult stages were right under the scientists’ noses all along: they have been found long ago in the same rocks as Pseudooides.

Surprisingly, these long-lost family members are not complex segmented animals at all, but ancestors of modern jellyfish.

Dr Kelly Vargas from the University of Bristol said: “It seems that, in trying to classify these fossils, we’ve previously been barking up the wrong branch of the animals family tree.”

Professor Philip Donoghue, also from the University of Bristol, co-led the research with Professor Xiping Dong of Peking University.

Professor Donoghue added “We couldn’t have reunited these ancient family members without the amazing technology which allowed us to see inside the fossilized bodies of the embryos and adults.”

The team used the Swiss Light Source, a gigantic particle accelerator near Zurich, Switzerland, to supply the X-rays used to image the inside of the fossils.

This showed that the details of segmentation in the Pseudooides embryos to be nothing more than the folded edge of an opening, which developed into the rim of the cone-shaped skeleton that once housed the anemone-like stage in the life cycle of the ancient jellyfish.

Luis Porras, who helped make the discovery while still a student at the University of Bristol, said: “Pseudooides fossils may not tell us about how complex animals evolved, but they provide insights into the how embryology of animals itself has evolved.

“The embryos of living jellyfish usually develop into bizarre alien-like larvae which metamorphose into anemone-like adults before the final jellyfish (or ‘medusa’) phase.

“Pseudooides did things differently and more efficiently, developing directly from embryo to adult. Perhaps living jellyfish are a poor guide to ancestral animals.”

Professor Donoghue added: “It is amazing that these organisms were fossilised at all.

“Jellyfish are made up of little more than goo and yet they’ve been turned to stone before they had any chance to rot: a mechanism which some scientists refer to as the ‘Medusa effect’, named after the gorgon of Greek mythology who turned into stone anyone that laid eyes upon her.”

The Bristol team are still looking for fossil remains of the rest of Pseudooides life cycle, including the ‘medusa’ jellyfish stage itself. However, jellyfish fossils are few and far between, perhaps ironically because the ‘Medusa effect’ doesn’t seem to work on them.

In the interim, the embryos of Pseudooides have been reunited with their adult counterparts, just in time for Christmas.

Reference:
Baichuan Duan, Xi-Ping Dong, Luis Porras, Kelly Vargas, John A. Cunningham, Philip C. J. Donoghue. The early Cambrian fossil embryo Pseudooides is a direct-developing cnidarian, not an early ecdysozoan. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2017; 284 (1869): 20172188 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.2188

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Bristol.

A scientific analysis of fossilised tree resin has caused a rethink of Australia’s prehistoric ecosystem, and could pave the way to recovering more preserved palaeobiological artefacts from the time of dinosaurs or prehistoric mammals.

In a project that could be straight out of Jurassic Park, Monash University researchers and collaborators from the Deakin Institute of Frontier Materials (IFM) used nuclear magnetic resonance to investigate the make-up of 52 to 40-million-year-old amber samples recovered from sites in Anglesea, Victoria, and Strahan, Tasmania.

Study lead author, Andrew Coward, an Honours student from the Monash School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, said the amber captured a period in time during the Eocene Epoch (56 to 33.9 million years ago).

“This is an unparalleled method of preservation, and provides insights into past organisms, ecosystems and environments,” said Mr Coward.

Amber, also called resinite or fossilised resin, is organic material created through the fossilisation of the resins of seed plants.

“Our collaboration aimed to identify the original plant sources of amber at Anglesea and Strahan and to establish the way they degraded during their tens of millions of years underground,” said co-researcher Associate Professor Jeffrey Stilwell, also from the Monash School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment.

Project collaborator Dr Luke O”Dell from IFM said this degradation could potentially have a major impact on the preserved palaeobiological information contained within the samples, and the sort of information we can recover about Earth’s ancient past.

By measuring how each sample absorbed and re-emitted electromagnetic radiation, Dr O”Dell, was able to probe the physical and chemical properties of the amber and identify distinct botanical sources.

Monash University researchers conducted their own chemical analysis using reflective and infrared spectroscopy.

“Nuclear magnetic resonance turned out to be extremely useful as it provided us with a unique fingerprint of the chemical structure of each piece of amber,” Associate Professor Stilwell said.

“This study, sponsored by the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects scheme (led by Stilwell), could represent the first unambiguous discovery of indigenous Class II amber in Australia,” he said.

“Amber can be separated into different classes based on which plants it came from, and the discovery of Class II amber from the Anglesea site could mean certain prehistoric plants capable of producing cadinene-based amber were native to Australia during the Eocene Epoch, which is something that has never been proven due to their absence from the fossil record.

“Another possibility is that there may even be an entirely new, previously unidentified botanical source capable of exuding cadinene resins.”

Associate Professor Stilwell said other outcomes of the study had important implications for the field of amber prospecting, by demonstrating how even visually altered amber could still be used to recover valid palaeobotanical and palaeobiological data.

Of particular note was the amount of amber that showed no significant chemical changes despite being extensively visibly altered during millions of years beneath the earth, suggesting such samples could still have preserved intact palaeobiological and palaeoenvironmental information.

Understanding which factors and reactions influence amber as it degrades and how this impacts stored biochemical information could make it much easier for the future collection of amber with intact palaeobiological data.

Dr O”Dell said the discovery was even more significant due to Australia’s sparse amber record.

“While there have been recent reports of amber stretching back 100 million years to the mid-Cretaceous period, the largest known deposits of Australian amber come from the Latrobe Valley coal measures in Victoria and are roughly 3 million to 23 million years old,” he said.

All amber samples that remained after IFM’s analysis are now being housed with Museums Victoria.

The project’s full findings, “Taphonomy and chemotaxonomy of Eocene amber from southeastern Australia,” have been accepted for publication in the Organic Geochemistry journal.

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Monash University.