Cretaceous Amber: Glimpses of Terrestrial Ecosystems During the “Age of Dinosaurs”
Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum discusses his team’s recent discoveries of animals trapped in Cretaceous amber
A talk by Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, held as part of the 2018 Canadian Paleontology Conference
Saturday, Sept. 22
4:30 pm
106 Biology Building, 112 Science Pl.
Free and open to the public
Info: artsandscience.usask.ca/geology | michael.cuggy@usask.ca
Abstract:
Over the last decade, amber has become a valuable supplement to the fossil record of vertebrates. It preserves delicate structures in exquisite detail and allows us to extract palaeoecological information from a wide range of depositional settings. Researchers can now analyse a few microscopic amber pieces from a fossil horizon and determine which groups of trees produced the fossil resin (Tappert et al., 2011), and ecological conditions in the area (e.g., Wolfe et al., 2012; Davies et al., 2017). If amber is relatively abundant, it can also be used to examine the insects, plants, and vertebrates that once lived in the ancient forest—providing a remarkably complete picture of the forest and its inhabitants (e.g., Grimaldi, 2002). Cretaceous deposits that contain larger amber pieces have the potential to capture parts of organisms once thought too large to be preserved in amber. These new discoveries provide insights into soft tissues and juvenile growth stages that are poorly represented elsewhere in the fossil record. As part of this talk, we will review some of our recent discoveries of vertebrates trapped in Cretaceous amber, including dinosaurs, toothed birds, and snakes (e.g., Xing et al., 2016, 2017). We will discuss how these discoveries have changed our understanding of the groups involved, and how these finds relate to both the fossil record and amber research on a global scale. We will also discuss future research directions in Cretaceous amber, and the role that Canada is playing in these developments