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Science 1 September 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5791, p. 1213
DOI: 10.1126/science.313.5791.1213d
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Random Samples

Figure 1
This tiny fly is is one of a variety of bug and plant fossils recently found in amber desposits on the banks of the Amazon in northeastern Peru. John J. Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with colleagues from France and Peru, has been plying the river in search of 15-million-year-old Miocene outcroppings that would reveal the history of the region. "The discovery virtually instantaneously opens a window to the Amazon," he says. There have been only three other finds of amber-encased fossils in Latin America covering the past 65 million years, he says. The abundance of species--13 arthropods and some 30 plant, fungus, and bacterium types--confirms that a rich tropical rainforest thrived even then, the scientists report in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

CREDIT: ANDRÉ NEL/MUSÉUM NATIONAL D'HISTOIRE NATURELLE, PARIS




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)