Tiny time capsules: first South American amber insects reveal a very different ancient Amazon

Scientists working in an Ecuadorian quarry have pulled off a first for South America: prehistoric insects sealed inside amber, pristine “little windows into the past” that capture life from about 112 million years ago. The haul, described in Communications Earth & Environment, arrives from the Hollín Formation on the edge of today’s Amazon basin and dates to a pivotal moment when flowering plants were just starting to spread across the planet.

Until now, almost all amber with animal inclusions from the last 130 million years came from the Northern Hemisphere, leaving the southern half of the world—once the supercontinent Gondwana—something of a mystery. That gap just narrowed. In hundreds of glistening fragments, researchers found beetles, flies, ants, wasps and other arthropods, along with pollen grains and pieces of leaves. “Amber pieces are little windows into the past,” said Oxford paleoentomologist Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, who wasn’t involved in the study, noting how the find helps chart the earliest give-and-take between insects and newly evolving flowers.

Field Museum paleobotanist Fabiany Herrera, a co-author, said the fossils point to a humid, resin-rich forest unlike the rainforest we know. Ferns and conifers dominated, including araucariacean relatives of the Monkey Puzzle tree that no longer grow in Amazonia. “It was a different kind of forest,” Herrera said, and its trees bled the resin that would harden into amber and trap the tiniest residents of the Cretaceous under a glassy glaze.

The team, guided by geology notes and local knowledge of the Genoveva quarry, teased out two kinds of amber. One type formed underground around plant roots and, sealed off from the bustle above, carried no biological inclusions. The rarer type dripped into the open air as stalactite-like globules, the perfect flypaper for midges, long-legged flies, ants and more. Smithsonian researcher Carlos Jaramillo recalled arriving on site and realizing just how rich the deposit was:

“There’s so much amber in the mines,” he said, easier to spot in a stripped quarry face than under jungle cover.

For entomologists, the significance is twofold. It’s the first confirmed record of Cretaceous insects in South American amber, and it anchors the story of insect–flower coevolution in equatorial Gondwana, not just in northern forests. American Museum of Natural History entomologist David Grimaldi, who wasn’t part of the project, put it simply: amber preserves the tiny, delicate things most fossil beds lose. That matters when you’re trying to see how early pollinators fed, hid, or hitched rides among the first angiosperms.

The work is just beginning. The Ecuadorian amber cache gives scientists a rare, layered view of an early Amazonian landscape—resin-oozing conifers, ferny understories, and the small creatures weaving through it all as flowering plants took their first bow. Pérez-de la Fuente called that partnership one of nature’s most successful. Thanks to a quarry wall and a few honey-colored nodules, we can now watch it flicker to life, frame by frame.

With input from CBS News, Nature, and the Independent.