On Jul. 7, the seventh film in the Jurassic Park series, "Jurassic World: A New Beginning," opened in Korea. In the movie, the protagonist goes to an old research facility to obtain dinosaur DNA that could be a clue to a new drug. The first Jurassic Park, released in 1993, depicted extracting blood from a mosquito trapped in resin to find and clone dinosaur DNA.
Scientists have found, for the first time in South America, insects from the dinosaur era that inspired the movie's premise. A team led by Javier Delclòs, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Barcelona in Spain, announced in the international journal Communications Earth & Environment on the 19th, "At a quarry in Ecuador, South America, we found a Cretaceous amber deposit containing insects from 112 million years ago."
Amber containing Cretaceous organisms from the Northern Hemisphere has been found in France and Myanmar, but this is the first discovery in South America. Professor Delclòs said, "This is the first time Mesozoic amber has been found in South America," adding, "All the insects found in the amber are new species."
◇A time capsule containing the Cretaceous dinosaur era
Amber is a gemstone used for jewelry, but it is not a mineral. It is tree resin, like sap, that has hardened over a long time. If a small animal was beneath the dripping sap, it becomes a fossil in lifelike form. It is, in a sense, a time capsule. The Mesozoic Cretaceous (143.1 million to 66 million years ago) was a period when large reptiles like dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems.
The team heard that amber had been found at the Genoveva quarry in the Amazon rainforest of eastern Ecuador and visited the site in 2022. The amber is thought to have originated from the resin of conifers that once covered Gondwana, the supercontinent that included the entire Southern Hemisphere. The team collected and analyzed 60 pieces of amber that originated from resin on the above-ground parts of trees in the quarry.
From the amber, 21 specimens belonging to five insect orders were recovered. The insects included mosquitoes featured in the movie, as well as flies, wasps, and beetles. All were insects that actually lived alongside dinosaurs in wetlands. There was even spider silk. No plant remains were found inside the amber, but rock samples revealed various plant fossils such as spores, pollen, and leaves.
However, as in the movie, drawing blood from a mosquito in amber to restore dinosaur DNA is virtually impossible. Dinosaur DNA was likely destroyed long ago by chemicals in the resin. Professor Delclòs said, "At least with current technology, we cannot recreate Jurassic Park with Cretaceous amber."
Earlier, insects that may have sucked dinosaur blood were also found in Northern Hemisphere amber. In 2017, a research team from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History announced in the international journal Nature Communications, "By examining 99-million-year-old Mesozoic Cretaceous amber found in northern Myanmar with a microscope and computed tomography (CT), we were able to identify several ticks along with dinosaur feathers."
It was known that ticks lived in the Cretaceous, raising the possibility that they sucked dinosaur blood, but this was the first direct evidence found. However, the researchers also said then that, contrary to the movie's imagination, because DNA completely degrades over tens of millions of years, restoring dinosaur DNA is impossible.
◇A window into research on Southern Hemisphere rainforest ecosystems
The team said the insects in the amber offered a chance to view the rich biodiversity of the Southern Hemisphere's rainforests at the time. Co-author Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama said, "Pollen and plant fossils identified in the rocks containing the amber show the presence of ferns and conifers, cycads and early angiosperms," adding, "Fungi that grow on the surface of plant leaves were also detected in the fossils."
These features contrast with the arid environments observed in other contemporaneous South American strata. In this survey, unlike contemporaneous amber-bearing strata in the Northern Hemisphere, no traces of fire were found. The team interpreted this to mean that the Southern Hemisphere was likely so humid at the time that wildfires did not occur.
In fact, among the insects found in the amber this time were species whose larvae develop in water, like mosquitoes. That implies extensive wetlands. The team inferred that at the time, South America had dense forests of conifers that dripped resin, with an understory vegetation filled with ferns beneath, and within it lived a diversity of insects.
Experts stress that the discovery of amber-bearing strata is important for studying the Mesozoic Cretaceous. Co-author Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer of the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Germany said, "Future excavations could help the consolidation of biodiversity between South America and other regions of the former Gondwana supercontinent, such as Antarctica, Australia, and South Africa, where Cretaceous amber has been found so far."
References
Communications Earth & Environment (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02625-2
Nature Communications (2017), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01550-z