Science Alert has a story about the discovery of the oldest known amber. The amber dates to the Middle Devonian Period, some 385 mullion years ago and about 65 million years older than the previous record holder. Amber is fossilized tree resin, so land plants needed to evolve before amber was possible. This particular amber was found in a coal deposit in northwest China.

We tend to think of tree resin as an ancient, fragrant defense against  munching insects – one that fends off pests and scabs over the wounds left by their voracious mandibles.

But a new discovery suggests that these viscous secretions emerged in a very different world from the one our minds conjure when we think of amber – one without dinosaurs and even before insects had become major plant grazers.

In a bed of coal in China’s far northwest, paleontologists have found hundreds of microscopic fragments of amber that date back to the Middle Devonian, 385 million years ago – some 65 million years earlier than the previous record holder, and 150 million years before the first dinosaurs.

“The importance is not simply that the record is older,” paleontologist Cihang Luo, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and first author of the new study published in Science Advances, told ScienceAlert.

“The previous confirmed amber record came from the Late Carboniferous and was probably associated with seed plants. Our amber comes from the Middle Devonian, before seed plants had emerged and diversified.

“This means that a non-seed vascular plant was already capable of producing chemically complex terpenoid resin.”

All the details are in the paper “The earliest amber from the Middle Devonian of China“, which was published in the journal Science Advances.

Abstract

Resin production is a major innovation in land plants, signaling the evolution of specialized secretory systems, complex terpenoid biosynthesis, and defensive and wound-sealing functions. Yet its origin remains poorly constrained because fossilized resin (amber) is exceedingly rare in Paleozoic deposits, with the earliest widely accepted amber record from the Late Carboniferous. Here we report the earliest known amber from the Middle Devonian of China (~385 million years old), extending the geological record of amber by ~65 million years. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography–triple quadrupole mass spectrometry reveal chemical signatures comparable to conifer-type amber. These data indicate that some Middle Devonian vascular plants—most plausibly progymnosperms or arborescent lycopsids—had already evolved biosynthetic capacity consistent with terpene synthase. The early emergence of resin production may have promoted the ecological success of Devonian-Carboniferous terrestrial floras by enhancing protection and wound sealing.