Straight out of Jurassic Park: dinosaur-era insects discovered in amber in Ecuador

When resin oozed down the trunks of primeval trees in what is now Ecuador’s Amazon region, it occasionally caught an unsuspecting insect in its sticky grip. More than 100 million years later, palaeontologists have revealed those long-entombed victims: midges, beetles and wasps dating back to the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

112-million-year-old fossils

As reported, researchers working at the Genoveva quarry in Napo province say the amber samples – the oldest yet found in South America – provide an unprecedented look at the ecology of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent. The fossils are about 112 million years old, according to a team that published the findings this week.

Inside 60 fragments of amber, scientists identified 21 biological inclusions, spanning at least five insect orders. Among them were biting midges, the sort that may once have drawn blood from reptiles or even feathered dinosaurs, as well as non-biting flies, beetles, wasps and ants. One fragment preserved the strands of an ancient spider’s web.

The amber also contained microscopic pollen grains and spores, showing that ferns and conifers grew alongside newly emerging flowering plants. Roughly a third of the plant material belonged to angiosperms, a sign of the evolutionary shift that was reshaping global forests during this time.

Filling a southern gap in the fossil record

Most previously studied amber with such inclusions comes from the Northern Hemisphere, particularly Myanmar and Lebanon. Ecuador’s find fills a critical gap, offering the first detailed insect fossils from the Cretaceous tropics of South America.

“This is a rare glimpse of a world in transition,” said Carlos Bustamante, a geologist at the Central University of Ecuador and one of the study’s authors. “It shows how flowering plants and the insects that pollinated them were already shaping ecosystems in the time of the dinosaurs.”

But hold on. Before you, like me, start to get excited about Jurassic Park fantasies, note that while the specimens look uncannily lifelike, it’s not the same as in Spielberg’s classic. DNA cannot survive intact for more than a few million years, and, alas, no genetic material has been reported from the Ecuadorian amber.

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