World's Oldest Amber Comes From a World 150 Million Years Before Dinosaurs - ScienceAlert
Paleontologists in China have discovered 385-million-year-old amber fragments in a Middle Devonian coal bed. This finding predates previous records by 65 million years and suggests that non-seed vascular plants were capable of producing complex resin long before dinosaurs existed.
Why it matters
This discovery fundamentally shifts our understanding of plant evolution and the timeline of when chemically complex resin production first emerged in Earth's history.
Add ScienceAlert on Google One of the fragments embedded in the surrounding coal. (Luo et al., Sci. Adv. , 2026) 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 .
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