Provided by Will Dunham
In Washington (Reuters) -Ekwador in the Amazon Forest Region, which contains well -preserved wasp, medium, flies, beetles and other insect fossils, gives the gaze to the chalk ecosystem in South America 112 million years ago.
Amber is an analized wood resin. Sometimes amber is found with bioinojons – animals, plants and fungi that were stuck in adhesive objects until it hardened and eventually fossil.
In the amber pieces that researchers opened in their career near Archidona city Ecuador’s Napo province, there were insect biical part and even a spider network. The remains of fossil plants were found in nearby sediments.
Almost all of the main ones found so far have been in the northern hemisphere, and Ecuador’s discovery is the greatest contribution of amber from the dinosaur age found so far in South America. This region was part of the Gondwana, which eventually divided into South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent.
“Having found a new such importance on the ancient Gondwana continent, there is a very valuable information from a region where we used to have little data about organisms living there,” said Paleoentomologist Xavier Delcrona from Barcelona University, the main study published in Communications Earth & Environment magazine.
Researchers say the insects found in amber covered the laxatives – the ones that bite what they don’t – as well as aphids, wasps, cadisfyl and beetles.
Based on the understanding of similar insects, alive today, ecology in Amber, in Amber, provides insight into the ecosystem in which they live, says Paleoentomologist and research co -author Mónica Solórzano Kraemer of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany.
For example, chewing laxatives are probably fed with the blood of dinosaur, which at that time wandered.
“Amber essentially retains the exoskets of small organisms from the past.
“The resin is adhesive and made of trees to block pathogens, so it catches anything living in or around the tree. Air, resin polymerization and hardens, and then buried without oxygen, but Amber.
Fossils are dated to an important transition time in the Earth’s flora, when flowering plants prevailed. The fossilized plant remains revealed part of the flora at the time. Fossil stated that flowering plants were about 37% flora.
Flowering plants, called angiosperms, are now the largest and diverse group of plants, accounting for about 80% of the world’s plants. They make flowers and make their seeds in the fruit, and first appeared in the chalk, in the last dinosaur age.
Their closest relatives are Gymnosperms, a group that was against them on Earth and includes conifers and some others.
The discovery of fossils in Ecuador “opens the window, as the transition from Gymnosperm forests to today’s forests dominated by Angiosperms,” said delcrores.
(Will Dunham’s message, edited by Rosalba O’Brien)