STICKY TRAPS VS RESIN: AN ACTUALISTIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTAND THE TAPHONOMY OF AMBER

Amber is fossil resin that functioned as a trap, preserving ancient organisms with great fidelity even from the distant past. It represents a window into past biodiversity and ethology. Using artificial tree trunk sticky traps and natural resin emissions from the trees as amber analogues we studied in Madagascar some of the taphonomical processes that control the arthropod entrapment by resin from the flowering plant Hymenaea, one of the highest resin-producing trees and the producer of the Caribbean and African Cenozoic ambers and copals. We compared statistically the results of the natural entrapment by tree resins with the ensemble of arthropods trapped by artificial traps around the same trees. Our main aims were to review key questions about taphonomic biases and filters of the processes of fossilisation based on representative taxa in amber and to produce well-documented general, palaeoecological interpretations of the global amber fossil record. We demonstrate that fossil resins do not show proportionally the arthropod assemblages that lived in the ancient forest ecosystems, but in contrast they do show fundamental information about the biology of the past.

This project was funded by: National Geographic Global Exploration Fund Northern Europe, USA (GEFNE 127-14), Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Spain (AMBERIA 2015-2017 CGL2014-52163), and VolkswagenStiftung (90946), Germany