Amber is coveted all over the world both as jewelry and as a boat for prehistoric residues, with less samples that maintain ancient water, air bubbles, plants, insects or even birds.
Usually, amber forms for millions of years, as the tree resin is petrified, but paleontologists have accelerated this, creating amber pine fossils in 24 hours. The technique could help reveal the amber biochemistry as it forms, a process that will otherwise remain hidden in prehistory fog.
Published Monday in Scientific Reports magazine, the results of the fast mines are similar to a meal in a pressure kitchen. “It’s similar to an instapot,” said Evan Saitta, a research partner at the Chicago Museum and co-author of the paper.
The recipe for the synthetic amber began with pine resin from the Chicago Botanical Garden. Dr. Saitta and his co-writer, Thomas Kaye, an independent paleontologist, placed half-inch sediments in which the resin was incorporated into a device that Mr Kaye was built using a medical pill compressor, air canisters and other rubbish.
With the heating and pressure of the samples, the researchers were trying to simulate the diagnosis, the slow, humid natural and chemical transformation required before the establishment of the sediments on rock.
“Diagnosis is the absolute obstacle you need to go through to become fossilized,” Dr. Saitta said. “It’s the final boss.”
Some specimens produced by the researchers were imperfect, but few physical properties of Amber, such as dark coloring, breaking lines, dehydration and increased shine.
The two also realized that they had begun with the wrong Pefki family. The amber most commonly studied in paleontology is Sciadopitys, a group of trees whose Only the living relative is the Japanese pine umbrella.
Maria McNamara, a paleontologist at College Cork University in Ireland, who did not participate in the study, said future experiments should try additional types of plants.
“What we really want to get a handle is which resins are faster,” he said. He also points out that a chemical analysis of the accelerated orange was necessary to find out how close – or not – it was about real things. “The tree resin has survived, but we need a proper, complete chemical characterization,” he said.
For all the restrictions of the study, Dr. McNamara said that the simulated fossilized was an increasingly important area of ​​research. Some paleontologists have recreated bone or tissue wear to explore microbial effects. In its laboratory, researchers have samples of “thermal ripening” to investigate the maintenance of biological molecules in heat.
Without such simulations, “we just trust the fossilized file,” he said. “Experiments help us say the fact of fiction and determine the degree to which the fossilized file lies.”
Dr. Saitta has tried other simulations. In 2018, he buried a wet sediment finish to see how it would be compressed. This was dirty and unsuccessful. But after working with Mr Kaye on the pressure-kitchen device, they had more success in studying the previous stages of the fossil leaf, wings and lizard feet. With these samples, the keratin on a feather, for example, was washed away, leaving a dark footprint that resembles melanin similar to a fossilized feather. (At conferences, Dr. Saitta said, he likes to try other paleontologists to identify the visual difference between a simulation and a real fossil.)
In future amber experiments, Dr. Saitta aims to integrate insects, wings or plants into resin. One reason why this could prove useful is that real samples are valuable – some trade for thousands of dollars – making the catastrophic analysis impossible. “A preserved insect in a synthetic amber would not be valuable, since it would be laboratory,” said Dr. Saitta.
Researchers also plan to adapt their technique to decomposed organic material with pressure and simulate geological weather. This will record more realistically more fossil stages.
Looking further forward, experimental fossil techniques can even allow scientists to explore the fossils of the future, Dr. Saitta said. How will Anthropode’s life be fired? What would happen to tissue or bones injected by microplastics or industrial heavy metals?
We will not be here millions of years from now to learn. But with a device-like device, we can approach.
