The Deeper You Look Into Amber, The Stranger It Gets

Añadido: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]The year is 2016. A paleontologist walks into a gem shop in Myanmar, which is already a weird start to a science story. And he's looking at what the dealer thinks is a piece of jewelry with some plant matter inside. Except it's not plant matter. It's a chunk of dinosaur. Because apparently Tree Sap doesn't care about the rules of what should and should get preserved for 100 million years. And this isn't even the strangest thing people have found frozen in amber. See, amber is basically just fossilized tree resin, which sounds boring until you realize it's been accidentally creating the world's best time capsules since before humans existed. And because it hardens fast and preserves things in three dimensions, we're not getting crushed fossils that look like they got run over. We're getting snapshots, full scenes, moments that stopped midaction, which means scientists have been cracking open these golden rocks and finding things that should not exist. things that make you question what else is sitting in jewelry stores right now waiting to rewrite history. So, let's talk about some of the most disturbing, bizarre, and straight up shouldn't be possible discoveries that have come out of amber.

[00:01:03]Starting with a moment frozen in time that looks like it belongs in a nature documentary, except everything involved has been dead for a 100 million years.

[00:01:11]Now, here's where it gets genuinely weird, because what scientists found was not just a dead bug. was a fight that never got finished. Inside a piece of a 100-year-old amber, there's a spider and a wasp. Both of them are having the worst day of their lives at the exact same moment. The wasp flew into the spider's web, which already sucks. And the spider rushed over to deliver the killing bite, which sucks more for the wasp. And then tree resin just dumped on both of them mid attack. So now the wasp is sitting there with its giant eyes still visible, watching the spider come at it for literally all of eternity. And the spider never gets its meal because it got turned into a museum piece instead. This is the only fossil ever found of a spider in the act of attacking caught prey. Not hunting, not after the kill, but during. And it gets stranger because the amber didn't just trap the spider and wasp. It preserved 15 strands of the web. You can see the silk. But also, there's a second spider in the same web, which is a problem because orb weaver spiders are supposed to be solitary. They don't share. In fact, male spiders usually won't hesitate to attack other spiders in their territory. So, finding two of them hanging out together suggests either mating behavior or some kind of early social tolerance that we didn't think existed back then. So, the fossil resolves two things at once. One, it confirms spiders were spinning webs to catch flying insects 100 million years ago, which we suspected but didn't have any kind of proof for. Two, it is the oldest evidence of social behavior in spiders. The male was probably waiting around a mate, which means he was risking becoming prey himself just to stick around. And the female allowed it.

[00:02:44]The resin caught all of this. The web, the fight, the relationship, the wasps nightmare that genuinely never ended.

[00:02:50]But if you think a spiderweb and amber is wild, let me tell you about the guy who actually walked into the gem shop and realized he was looking at a dinosaur. But another quick thing first though, did you know that amber can actually be blue? Yes, it's a very rare type of amber that is found, but for some reason there is blue amber out there. If you'd like me to make a video about how blue amber comes about and why it is so much different than regular amber, let me know down in the comments below, as it's something I found out while researching this video. Back to the guy at the store, though, because in 2016, a paleontologist named Dr. Lida Jing was browsing amber dealers in Myanmar, and he spotted something in one of the pieces that was being sold as jewelry. The dealer thought it was plant matter. It wasn't. was eight vertebrae from a dinosaur's tail, complete with mummified skin and a halo of feathers still attached. And the whole thing was about to get polished into a necklace.

[00:03:39]This is the first time anyone actually found dinosaur tissue in amber. Not just a loose feather, but a piece of the animal. And the preservation is so good that scientists could see individual barbs and barbules on the feather in three dimensions and even trace the coloring, which was chestnut brown on top and white underneath. The tailbones proved it wasn't a bird either because birds have fused tail vertebrae and this didn't. So, it belonged to a non-avian therapod, probably a juvenile colurosaur about the same size as a sparrow. And it had fluffy downy feathers instead of a stiff flight kind. Here is how this happened. A small feathered dinosaur gets its tail stuck in resin, maybe on a branch or maybe after it's already detached. And as it struggles or after it dies, more resin flows over it and traps ants in a beetle that were nearby.

[00:04:24]So the whole thing becomes a tableau.

[00:04:25]It's a Cretaceous forest floor moment where a dinosaur, some insects, and tree sap all ended up in the same place at the same time. Discovery was called straight out of Jurassic Park. Except this time it was real. And if Dr. Jen hadn't recognized it, this priceless scientific specimen would have ended up as a decorative gem, which really makes you wonder what else is sitting in your jewelry stores right now or has already been destroyed to make some cheap necklace. And speaking of things that shouldn't be in tree sap, scientists also found a snake, which raises the question of what a snake was doing near resin in the first place. This one is from the same Myanmar amber deposits.

[00:05:02]It's 99 million years old and it's a baby. It's 2 in long with 97 tiny vertebrae running through its body. And it was so young that some of its bones hadn't fully hardened yet, which means it was either a newborn or maybe hadn't even hatched when it got trapped. They named it Zapus Myanmaresus, which translates to dawn snake of Myanmar. And it's the oldest snake ever found in a forested environment because before this, basically all fossil snakes from that time period came from marine sediments. So this proved snakes were already slithering around tropical forests while dinosaurs were around.

[00:05:34]Unfortunately, the skull was missing. It was probably lost when the resin got cut, but the vertebrae were enough to show something interesting. There were these little V-shaped spurs on the underside of the tailbones, which is a primitive feature that modern snakes don't have anymore. And the proportions showed that snakes had already developed their long limbroduce body form by the mid cretaceous, which makes sense, but seeing it preserved in 3D is different than just guessing. In a separate amber piece from the same area, scientists also found what might be snake skin. Was paper thin with a light and dark banded pattern. If it's from the same species, it would be the first snake skin ever discovered in amber. It shows that even back then, snakes had camouflage patterns. So, here is what probably happened. A baby snake fresh into the world, or maybe still figuring out how to exist, was moving through leaf litter or near some logs with resin ooze down and trapped it. Whether it hatched from an egg, or was born alive, we don't know. But based on its size and development, this thing was a newborn, which means somewhere a mother snake had a very brief funeral for it. Real quick before we go any further, if you're enjoying watching me explain why everything in the Cretaceous had a terrible time, hit the like button and subscribe if you want more of this type of content, and follow me on Tik Tok and Instagram for the videos YouTube won't let me post here. Anyways, let's get back to more prehistoric suffering. Now, finding reptiles and tree resin is one thing, but scientists also found a frog, which is a whole different problem because frogs need water and tree sap is not water. It's very not close to water at all. This one's also from Myanmar.

[00:07:02]It's also 99 million years old. It's about the size of a postage stamp and it's the oldest frog ever found in amber. They named it Electrona Lemon, which literally just means amber frog.

[00:07:13]Yeah, because sometimes scientists don't overthink it. When they do, you get like Megatron the Dinosaur X and stuff like that. So, sometimes it's good just to name things Amber Frog. And despite being nearly 100 million years old, this thing looks very modern. Like if you shrunk a Firebellyi toad and dunked it in resin, it would look exactly the same. which suggests that frogs figured out their body plan early and have just stuck with it ever since. What makes this discovery important is that it's the first actual proof that frogs lived in tropical rainforest during the dinosaur era. We assumed they did, but assumptions don't really count as proof.

[00:07:46]And before this, we didn't have direct evidence. Now we do because the amber didn't just preserve the frog. It also trapped bits of spiders, velvet worms, and bamboo from the same environment.

[00:07:56]So, we're looking at a full ecosystem snapshot. There is even a beetle in the amber right next to the frog. And scientists think it might have been the frog's last meal or at least the snack it was eyeing when the resin flowed down and ended both of their days at the same time. So this frog was just sitting there probably on a branch or in the leaf litter getting ready to eat and then it just became part of the fossil record instead. This whole thing confirms that by the time the T-Rex was stomping around, you could already hear tiny frogs croaking in the jungle. For at least 99 million years, that has been happening. Which is a comforting thought. Like literally, frogs have been on this earth for so long and we haven't. That's kind of a crazy thing to think about that frogs will probably outlast us even too. But if frogs and snakes seem out of place in amber, at least they weren't actively trying to kill each other when it happened. Which brings us to the ancient ants. In some Burmese deposits, scientists found two worker ants from different species locked in combat, and one of them appears to have the other's head and its jaws, which is a level of violence you don't usually get with fossils. This is direct evidence of warfare between ancient ants, and it is the only fossil that shows this behavior because again, amber does not care about the rules of what should and shouldn't be preserved.

[00:09:07]The thing is, solitary insects don't fight each other. They avoid each other.

[00:09:11]Social ants fight each other all the time because they're defending territory and resources. And finding the mid battle proves that use social behavior, which it means advanced colony organization with queens and workers and soldiers. That was already happening 100 million years ago. Before this, we only had confirmed ant colonies from about 20 million years ago. So, this pushes that timeline back by 80 million years, which is insane if you think about it. What is even better is that scientists found different casts in the amber of queens, soldiers, workers all doing their jobs and some of them doing those jobs on each other with extreme prejudice.

[00:09:48]Modern ants conduct raids and skirmishes with rival colonies. And apparently their ancestors also did this, which means that the great ant war has been going on since the Cretaceous, and nobody has thought to negotiate peace since. You know, humans could learn a lot from our ants. If you've ever wondered if humans had anything in common with ants, we both love var for absolutely no reason. There is even a modern species called head hunter ants that collects enemy heads to line their nests, which is genuinely psychotic behavior, but also exactly what this fossil suggests happened. One ant killed another, grabbed the head, and was presumably taking it home as a trophy when the resin made everything a permanent fossil record installation.

[00:10:27]So, ants have been waging war since dinosaurs existed. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and the more I'm glad I'm not an ant.

[00:10:35]Speaking of things that make ancient life seem miserable, scientists also found ticks, which means parasites have been ruining everyone's day for at least 99 million years. In 2017, researchers described a piece of amber containing a blood engorged tick gripping a feather from a feathered dinosaur. And it's exactly as gross as it sounds. The tick's body is distended like it just finished a meal. it it's still attached to the feather at the moment the resin trapped both of them which provides the first direct evidence that ticks fed on dinosaurs. We suspected this was happening but again suspicion doesn't count as evidence and now we have proof in the form of a tiny vampire frozen midbite. They literally named it Dino Croton Draculi which means Dracula's terrible tick. That's a very strong choice. You know how I mentioned sometimes scientists go overboard with their names? There you go. That's a perfect example. The amber piece actually held five ticks total. And two of them were covered in tiny hair-like fibers that turned out to be from beetle larae, which are the kind that live in bird's nests and each shed feathers and skin. So the ticks weren't just randomly in the forest. They were in a dinosaurs nest, which means feathered dinosaurs were building nests, shedding feathers in them, and dealing with both beetles and ticks as a result exactly the same way modern birds do. This gives us a full picture of the Cretaceous nest ecosystem. dinosaur parents or babies, their shed feathers, dermested beetles clitting up, and ticks lurking around waiting to drink blood from anyone who stayed still long enough. It is a gross little snapshot, but it confirms that dinosaurs, especially the feathered ones, had to deal with the same parasitic problems that birds and us even deal with now. So, the next time you pull a tick off mid-hike, just remember that dinosaurs probably did the same thing as well. They couldn't use tweezers, but I'm sure they tried and failed and got bitten anyway. Now, ticks drinking blood is one thing, but at least they don't make you climb a tree first. Which is where this next discovery gets genuinely disturbing because scientists found an ant in the same Myanmar amber with a fungal stock growing out of its back. And this isn't just any fungus. It's ofiocortispaps, the same type that causes what's called zombie ant disease, where the fungus infects the ant, takes over its brain, and makes it climb to a high point and clamp down with its jaws. And then the fungus grows out of the ant's body to spread spores. If you've seen The Last of Us, that's what they based it on, except this is real and it's been happening for at least 99 million years.

[00:12:57]The ant in the amber is pupa, which means it got infected before it even became an adult. And the fungal stock is coming out of the back instead of its head. But the mechanisms are the same.

[00:13:06]You can see the flaskshaped structures that produce spores under a microscope, which confirms that this is the same family of fungi that currently turns ants into puppets. In a separate piece, scientists also found a fly with a fungal filament piercing through its body, which is unusual because modern ofiocortisps rarely infects flies. It goes after ants, cicas, things that live in predictable places. So, finding on a fly suggests that 99 million years ago, this fungus was still experimenting with which hosts to zombify. And apparently, it was not picky with which hosts they tried. And here's the part that shows how advanced ant colonies were back then. The infected ant pupa in the amber was found separated from any colony mates. And scientists think the other ants dragged it away before the fungus fully erupted, which is exactly what modern ants do. They practice social hygiene by removing sick members to protect the colony. So even in the Cretaceous, ant colonies recognized when one of their own was acting weird and removed the problem. The fungus was already perfecting it strategy and the ants were already perfecting their defense. Neither side won. Both just kept going. But ants weren't the only ones with a complicated relationship with fungi because scientists also found a beetle that instead of being zombified was actively farming the fungi which pushes the concept of agriculture back by about a 100 million years before humans even existed. Yes, this beetle was a farmer. This beetle was also from the Myanmar amber. It's tiny. It may be 2 mm long. And it has these specialized pockets in its hind legs called myangia, which are basically portable green houses for fungal spores. The beetle would bore into wood and use these pockets to plant the spores and then eat the fungus that grew, which means it was cultivating its own food source in the middle of the Cretaceous while dinosaurs were doing whatever the dinosaurs did.

[00:14:52]The amber didn't just preserve the beetle, though. It also captured filaments and spores of the fungus itself. sitting right there next to the beetle, which suggests the resin hit while the beetle was in its wood gallery actively tending to its crop. One moment it's farming, the next it's part of the fossil record along with its harvest.

[00:15:10]What makes this discovery important is that it proves insect agriculture is way older than we thought. Leaf cutter ants are famous for farming fungi, but they only started doing that tens of millions of years later. This beetle beat them to it, which makes it the first known insect farmer. And it shows that evolution of agriculture happened multiple times independently in different species across millions of years. You know, some animals today are very, very similar with very similar body plans, but aren't technically related at all. For an example, eels and snakes, very similar body plan. If you ask someone thousands of years ago, they might think that's the same thing. It's kind of cool to think about that us humans have that exact same relationship as beetles from a 100 million years ago.

[00:15:53]We both have used agriculture. Crazy thought. The beetles Mike and Gia even had glandurial secretions to keep the spores alive during transport, which is a level of sophistication you wouldn't expect from something that small. It's not just carrying the spores, it is nurturing them. While dinosaurs stomped around above ground, this beetle was quietly perfecting fungal cultivation inside a log until the tree resin turned both the farmer and crop into a tiny time capsule. If you're watching this right now thinking agriculture is a uniquely human achievement, it is not because beetles did it first. We just did it louder. And if a beetle farming fungi sounds impossible, let me tell you about the crab they found. Because crabs live in water and amber comes from trees. And those two things occupying the same space should not be possible.

[00:16:39]In 2021, researchers described a 5 mm long crab perfectly preserved in a 100 million-year-old amber, complete with claws, compound eyes, and even gills that were still visible under CT scanning. They named it Cretaceartha Aan, which means the immortal Cretaceous spirit. Again, there's another crazy name for you. and it represents the first non-marine crab from the dinosaur era ever found in amber, which is a sentence that raises more questions than it answers. Finding a crab in amber is, in the words of one scientist, is exactly as likely as finding a needle in a hay stack. Crabs belong in water.

[00:17:16]Resin comes from trees on land. The fact that both ended up in the same place means this crab was either living in fresh water or was semi-terestrial, which pushes the timeline for crabs leaving the ocean back by about 30 million years. The amber piece itself had no sand or marine debris, which rules out a beach scenario. And everything about the preservation suggests it came from a brackish lagoon or swamp environment. Some modern crabs, especially mangrove crabs, can climb trees and hang out in damp vegetation.

[00:17:45]So maybe this ancient crab was doing the same thing when it wandered too close to the resin. What's remarkable is just how modern it looks. Despite being a 100 million years old, Cretaspara has fully developed pincers, a broad shell, and gills that suggest it still needed to stay near the water, but it was clearly living outside full marine conditions.

[00:18:05]It bridges the gap between marine crabs and the land crabs that we see today.

[00:18:09]And it confirms what DNA studies predicted, but fossils hadn't shown yet.

[00:18:13]So yeah, a crab got stuck in tree sap.

[00:18:15]That is crazy. Look, all of this has been about creatures dying in the resin so far. But the next one we're going to talk about isn't about death at all.

[00:18:22]It's about public transportation, which is somehow even weirder. In 44 million-year-old Baltic amber, scientists found a fly with two tiny mites clinging to its thorax. And both of them were just trying to get somewhere when the resin turned their commute into a permanent exhibit. By the way, this is called forcy, which is the scientific term for hitchhiking. Don't ask me why it sounds like horsey as if someone was riding a horse when literally that's what a hitchhiker is doing. Scientists can be a little bit goofy sometimes. Anyways, to further describe this, it's where a small creature grabs onto a larger one for a free ride without harming it. It is very different than a parasite that actively is harming the creature. The mites do not bite or feed on the fly. They just hold on tight and wait for the fly to take them somewhere useful. And in this case, the fly took them directly into tree sap. So, good good job there, Fly.

[00:19:10]You killed everybody. Each might is barely the size of a grain of pepper.

[00:19:14]So, the fact that we can even see them in amber is remarkable. But what's more remarkable is that this exact behavior still happens today. You can catch a fly or a beetle right now, and if you look close enough, there's a decent chance you'll find a little might hanging on, doing exactly what these fossilized ones were doing 44 million years ago. The fly probably got stuck mid-flight when it landed on something coated in resin, and the mites couldn't bail out because they were locked in position, which means their evolutionary strategy of let someone else do the walking finally backfired in the most brutal way possible. What this shows is that some behaviors don't change. These mites have been catching rides on flying insects for tens of millions of years just because it works, and it'll probably keep working till something fundamental about insect biology changes, which doesn't seem likely anytime soon. Amber is some of the coolest things we can look into in the field of paleontology because it can actually capture snapshots of the prehistoric world. And I'm so excited for further discoveries of amber and finding out new things that we just have no idea about yet. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to give it a like and comment below about any other amber discoveries that you would like me to cover. Also, let me know if you want to learn about blue amber like I mentioned earlier. Make sure to also subscribe to the channel with post notifications so you don't miss out on any of our future uploads. Hype the video. And if you want to watch another one of our videos, you can click the one that's on your screen right now.