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Language: en
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Ancient
Amber this is George poar speaking I've
been studying Amber since
1975 from collecting it in mines and
along the Sea Coast to determining its
Botanical source and describing a range
of fossils and Amber from both tertiary
and Cretaceous
periods this is one of the pieces that
we were able to collect from the
Dominican mines and it identifies the
plant that produced the Amber this is a
petal of the elor robo tree which was
probably a canopy tree in the ancient
Dominican Amber
Forest here you have a stamman of the
algaroba tree and this is fantastic
because as a stamman fell it was
shedding pollen and a stream of pollen
came out in the Amber in fact some have
even made attempts to germinate these
pollen grains I don't know of any
successful results however but they look
just as if they had fallen out of a
recent anther
beautiful the ant here belongs to a
group of army ants and this particular
genus of ant especially targets nests of
wasps and this ant is returning from a
raid and it was carrying a wasp Pupa
under it this is a very interesting case
of Predator prey
Association and it's the only one I know
of in Amber where you have evidence of
prey by this group of army ants now
vertebrates are rare it's true and here
we have a beautiful gecko that is
preserved in the
Amber and the lizard we can identify as
a member of the genus
spatius and this one was probably up in
the tree and maybe the lizard was
attacked by a predator there's several
possibilities here and it tells us
something about the vertebrates that
occurred in the Amber
Forest now when it comes to birds and
mammals we have mostly evidence from
feathers and hairs we don't have any
complete birds as far as I know so what
we have to do is to try to determine the
type of bird that produces feather based
on characters of the plume here and in
this case this came from a picolet or a
type of
woodpecker and this is the only feather
that's been determined so far in Amber
down to a particular genus of birds art
studies on ecosystem of the ancient
Dominican Amber Forest provides Clues to
understanding our own ecosystem and
where it may be heading as with many
other things discovering in the past
sometimes asks more questions than it
answers and uh these are left for the
Next Generation to
solve you can find more photos of
ancient Amber on our website at
pbs.org noova slj