Is amber tricking palaeontologists?

can amber record the biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems that disappeared long ago?

It is important to observe the present in order to study the past. The principle of uniformitarianism –established by the naturalist Charles Lyell, well-known among modern geology- considers natural process that acted in the past to be the same ones acting in the present and doing so with the same intensity. Under this perspective, the scientific team studied in situ the entrapment process of arthropods by resin from the plant Hymenaea verrucosa, a resinous leguminous angiosperm found in Madagascar lowland forests.

This study, conducted by eight researchers from Spain, Germany and the United States, counts on the participation of Xavier Delclòs, from the Faculty of Earth Sciences and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the University of Barcelona (IRbio); Mónica M. Solórzano Kraemer, from the Seckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt (Germany), and Enrique Peñalver, from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME), among others.

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