The Science Behind

Dreaming
New research sheds light on how and why we

remember dreams--and what purpose they are likely

to serve
• By Sander van der Linden on July 26, 2011

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Credit: Getty Imag es
 can nhac
For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early
civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world
and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were thuyet phuc
convinced
tien tri
that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been
a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until
the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of
dreaming. Freud’s theory centred around the notion of repressed
loai , sap xep
longing -- the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved,
repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed
that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different
theories about their meaning.

Since then, technological advancements have allowed for the

development of other theories. One prominent neurobiological theory
of dreaming is the “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” which states that
dreams don’t actually mean anything: they are merely electrical brain
thoi thuc
impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories.
Humans, the theory goes, construct dream stories after they wake up,
no luc bao la
in a natural attempt to make sense of it all. Yet, given the vast
documentation of realistic aspects to human dreaming as well as
indirect experimental evidence that other mammals such as cats also
dream, evolutionary psychologists have theorized that dreaming really
does serve a purpose. In particular, the “threat simulation theory”
suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defence
mechanism that provided an evolutionary advantage because of its
capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events –
enhancing the neuro-cognitive mechanisms required for efficient
threat perception and avoidance.

So, over the years, numerous theories have been put forth in an
attempt to illuminate the mystery behind human dreams, but, until
huu hinh kho nam bat
recently, strong tangible evidence has remained largely elusive.
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Yet, new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience provides
nen tamg
compelling insights into the mechanisms that underlie dreaming and
the strong relationship our dreams have with our memories. Cristina
Marzano and her colleagues at the University of Rome have succeeded,
for the first time, in explaining how humans remember their dreams.
The scientists predicted the likelihood of successful dream recall based
on a signature pattern of brain waves. In order to do this, the Italian
research team invited 65 students to spend two consecutive nights in
their research laboratory.

During the first night, the students were left to sleep, allowing them to
get used to the sound-proofed and temperature-controlled rooms.
During the second night the researchers measured the student’s brain
waves while they slept. Our brain experiences four types of electrical
brain waves: “delta,” “theta,” “alpha,” and “beta.” Each represents a
different speed of oscillating electrical voltages and together they form
the electroencephalography (EEG). The Italian research team used this
technology to measure the participant’s brain waves during various
sleep-stages. (There are five stages of sleep; most dreaming and our
most intense dreams occur during the REM stage.) The students were
woken at various times and asked to fill out a diary detailing whether
or not they dreamt, how often they dreamt and whether they could
remember the content of their dreams.

While previous studies have already indicated that people are more
likely to remember their dreams when woken directly after REM sleep,
trung bay
the current study explains why. Those participants who exhibited more
low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were also more likely to
remember their dreams.

This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity

ma hoa
the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and
retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That
dao dông
is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make
the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to
you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological
mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams)
are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are
awake.

In another recent study conducted by the same research team, the

authors used the latest MRI techniques to investigate the relation
between dreaming and the role of deep-brain structures. In their study,
the researchers found that vivid, bizarre and emotionally intense
dreams (the dreams that people usually remember) are linked to parts
of the amygdala and hippocampus. While the amygdala plays a primary
role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the
hippocampus has been implicated in important memory functions,
such as the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term
memory.
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The proposed link between our dreams and emotions is also

highlighted in another recent study published by Matthew Walker and
colleagues at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley, who
found that a reduction in REM sleep (or less “dreaming”) influences
our ability to understand complex emotions in daily life – an essential
tinh nang
feature of human social functioning. Scientists have
xay ra
also recently identified where dreaming is likely to occur in the
brain. A very rare clinical condition known as “Charcot-Wilbrand
Syndrome” has been known to cause (among other neurological
symptoms) loss of the ability to dream. However, it was not until a few
years ago that a patient reported to have lost her ability to dream while
having virtually no other permanent neurological symptoms. The
ton thuong
patient suffered a lesion in a part of the brain known as the right
vo nao
inferior lingual gyrus (located in the visual cortex). Thus, we know that
tao ra
dreams are generated in, or transmitted through this particular area of
the brain, which is associated with visual processing, emotion and
visual memories.
Taken together, these recent findings tell an important story about the
underlying mechanism and possible purpose of dreaming.

Dreams seem to help us process emotions by encoding and

constructing memories of them. What we see and experience in our
dreams might not necessarily be real, but the emotions attached to
these experiences certainly are. Our dream stories essentially try to
dai
strip the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of
it. This way, the emotion itself is no longer active. This mechanism
fulfils an important role because when we don’t process our emotions,
su lo lang
especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety. In
fact, severe REM sleep-deprivation is increasingly correlated to the
development of mental disorders. In short, dreams help regulate traffic
on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our
emotions and memories.
CONSERVATION

On U.S. Barrier
Islands, African-
Rooted Traditions
Protect against a
khong ngung

Relentlessly Rising
Ocean
A way of life nurtured for hundreds of years in the

U.S. Southeast guards coastlines from climate change

• By Sara Novak on April 6, 2023

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Joanna Heywa rd’s fam ily ha s owned land for six generat ion s on South Ca rolina’ s Saint Helena I sland, a center of Gullah Geechee culture. C redit: Sa ra N ova k
 nu trang
Once you are across the bridge onto Saint Helena Island, S.C., trinket
lan dam lay
shops and strip malls give way to fishing shacks and saltwater marshes.
heo lanh nhon nhip
Secluded from the bustling tourist traffic just a bridge away, the island
remains largely untouched. It preserves traditions fostered even before
buoc phai di qua
some of its residents’ ancestors were forced to traverse the more than
4,000 miles of ocean that separates the Saint Helena salt marshes from
Africa.

A logical first stop after arriving on Saint Helena from the mainland is
the Penn Center, a school for formerly enslaved West Africans that’s
now a cultural center. The Gullah Geechee people—members of an
ethnic group living on Saint Helena and other islands and coastal areas
hau due lam no le
in the U.S. Southeast—are descendants of Africans who were enslaved
on plantations in the region. Their culture is still defined by a rich
rao chan
heritage of West African traditions adapted to fit life on the barrier
islands where they lived, largely isolated from the rest of the American
colonies before the American Revolution.
thuoc dia cach mang
A school for formerly enslaved West Africans is now an African-
American cultural and educational center on Saint Helena Island called
the Penn Center. Credit: Sara Novak
be tong con hau
Tabby homes—built from a type of concrete made of broken oyster
vo boc
shells and sand—are still a common sight. Residents line their
irrigation ditches with shells, hang blue bottles from trees to ward off
evil spirits and weave intricate baskets with seagrass found along the
uoc luong
coast. There are still an estimated one million Gullah Geechee people
living on the coastal areas between Jacksonville, Fla., and Jacksonville,
N.C., according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Many still make their
tai san nguoi thua ke
homes on what are called heirs’ properties: land that’s passed down
without deeds from generation to generation.
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duy tri
Saint Helena is one of the few remaining sea islands in the U.S. that
recalls an earlier era. Some Gullah Geechee people have held onto their
lands since the first enslaved people arrived in what would become
South Carolina in the 16th century. Elsewhere along the coast, Gullah
Geechee families have yielded their lands to developers of hotels and
vacation homes and upscale gated communities. Dating from the end
of the Civil War, Gullah Geechee families have lost more than 14
million acres of family property, and only around one million acres
owned by the formerly enslaved group is still in family hands.

Occupying 64 square miles, Saint Helena is one of the centers of Gullah

bao la dai bang
Geechee culture. It’s a vast swath of pristine coastal land dotted with
maritime forests and salt marshes. Gullah Geechee people on Saint
bo ra tien mat
Helena still own their land because their ancestors put up cash to
obtain deeds in the 19th century. On other sea islands along the South
truoc day
Carolina coast, formerly enslaved people were given the lands initially
and then were pushed off them after Reconstruction. After Abraham
Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson, who held deeply racist
beliefs, became president, the land was returned to former plantation
dau gia
owners.* But on Saint Helena, Gullah Geechee people bid on land at
auction and split it up into family compounds such as the one owned
by the Heyward family, who still live on their property more than 150
years later. The island has a cultural protection overlay (CPO), a zoning
ordinance that gives protection against development of these lands.

duy tri
Those who remain on Saint Helena hope to stem the tide of
generational changes elsewhere in the Gullah community by refusing
to give up titles on their lands. Their self-sufficiency—adapted to living
in harmony with the coastline, especially in how the land is
developed—may prove vital to preserving the South Carolina coastline
against rising seas in the years ahead. From hunting deer, wild boar
and squirrels to cultivating rice, watermelon, sweet potatoes, red peas,
okra, peanuts and butter beans, the Gullah Geechee know how to thrive
on land that others have found punishing. Like the tides, their way of
life has an ebb and flow to it that is built and rebuilt as the waters rise
and retreat.

Beside the Spanish-moss-draped live oaks, whose canopies are so thick

that a cloudless sky hardly peeps through, stands Joanna Heyward, a
soft-spoken cultural center volunteer with tight black curls and a warm
smile. Her family has owned land on Saint Helena for six generations.
Her husband’s great-great-grandfather bought land on the island
during the Civil War at a cost of $1.25 an acre. He and his brothers had
to pick 400 pounds of cotton for each dollar they earned to buy the
land from former enslavers. They put together enough savings and
ended up with enough cash for 30 acres. “Today our family still owns
about 20 acres of that land,” Heyward says.
Side view of the Penn Center. Credit: Sara Novak

Heyward’s experience mirrors that of Marquetta Goodwine, known as

Queen Quet, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Goodwine has
spoken on behalf of the Gullah Geechee people before the United
Nations and the International Human Rights Association for American
Minorities. She’s also worked with Representative James Clyburn of
South Carolina to establish the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage
Corridor along the southeastern coast. Both sides of her family are
Gullah Geechee. She wears a violet silk gown embellished with gold
thread and seashells woven into her braided hair. Goodwine tells me
that Gullah Geechee people were fearful of purchasing their land, yet
they knew having a deed was a powerful means to achieving prosperity.
Land auctions were frightening for the formerly enslaved, who had
once been sold at auction themselves. “But this was not an auction
about you or family. This was about buying up the land that had been
left behind,” she says.
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The Gullah Geechee have retained over the centuries an acute

awareness of the fragile coastal ecosystem where they live. “Our people
don’t traditionally build their homes into the coastline but rather into
the center of their acreage,” so it’s less susceptible to hurricanes,
Goodwine says. Smaller and lighter homes don’t require as much
cement or packed soil to sustain the weight of a structure in the sandy
soil. “The water will eventually break through concrete no matter how
many times you rebuild,” she says. Mother Nature always wins.

More than half of the original salt marshes in the U.S. have been filled
in to create land for housing and industry along the coasts. When a new
resort is built by filling in marshland, water from storms has nowhere
to drain. Hilton Head Island, S.C., Tybee Island, Ga., Saint Simon’s
Island, Ga., and other islands along the South Carolina and Georgia
coastline now experience flooding more often. Across the Southeast,
losses caused by recent hurricane winds, land subsidence and sea-level
rise average $14 billion per year. An EPA report found that just one
acre of wetland can store up to 1.5 million gallons of
floodwater. “Without the salt marsh holding the coastal wooded
habitats known as maritime forest in place, and without our oyster
beds holding the salt marsh in place, you start to erode the sea islands,”
Goodwine says.
The barrier islands are landforms that developed from the buildup of
tidal sand deposits. They run parallel to the coastline and are
prominent along the Eastern Seaboard. The islands themselves are an
important line of defense when it comes to protecting the coastline
from storms, and their marshes absorb the onrush of waters from a
storm surge. A July 2022 study in Nature Geoscience found, however,
that sea-level rise will cause these islands to move closer to the shore,
which diminishes their ability to act as a buffer between the ocean and
beachfront property.

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The importance of preservation of Gullah Geechee culture—and the

consequent protection of island wetlands—was recognized in January.
The island’s planning commission blocked a controversial 500-acre
community on Saint Helena where developers intended to turn land
not owned by Gullah Geechee people—a section known as Pine Island—
into a luxury golf resort. Jessie White, south coast office director at the
Coastal Conservation League, says that cultural protection overlay
zoning has been crucial to keeping land out of the hands of
developers—unlike on Hilton Head, where property was bought up
from Gullah Geechee people, and those who remained were later
pushed out by higher taxes. “Inflating taxes has long been used to
remove people from their property,” White says.
Three hours south from Saint Helena, along the Georgia coast, Gullah
strongholds such as Sapelo Island, Ga., have also had some recent
victories. In 2020 residents of Hogg Hummock community on Sapelo
Island, a Gullah community on a remote island that is only reachable
by ferry, won a federal lawsuit that found that they were being
discriminated against and excluded basic services on the basis of race.
The county seat of McIntosh County also agreed to freeze residential
property taxes until 2025. Still, change is apparent. The contrast
between tiny wooden and tabby homes on family compounds and
newer, modern homes with double the square footage built atop
cemented stilts is apparent. “Every time I go back, I get a lump in my
throat when I see the new construction,” says Courtney McGill, a
member of the Hogg Hummock community who grew up on Sapelo
and whose family still has a home on the island. Local governments of
islands such as Saint Simon’s and communities in North Charleston,
S.C., have similarly taxed Gullah Geechee off their land.
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Two years ago Gullah Geechee people on Saint Helena fought to

block another development on Bay Point Island, a strip of sand used by
a Gullah Geechee fishing community there. Developers wanted to build
an ecotourist resort with 50 cottages, a spa, a fitness center,
restaurants and bars, all of which would have required the construction
of 10 septic systems.

The developers likely planned to fill in the marsh, which would have
destroyed the habitat of many marine species. “These waters are
already changing,” says Ed Atkins, a Gullah fisherman who has been
working the waters for 60 years. “There used to be a lot more fish in
these waters then there is now. [There are] less blue crab and oysters,
too.”

Providing shelter, food and nursery grounds, salt marshes are one of
the most critical habitats for ocean biodiversity for 75 percent of U.S.
commercial and recreational fish species, including white shrimp, blue
crab, red drum and flounder—all foods that are important to the Gullah
Geechee diet.
As sea level rises, salt marshes that once drained at low tide continually
flood. Sea level around Charleston has risen as much as 10 inches in
the past 73 years. As a result, marsh plants, which thrive in brackish
waters, germinate farther inland in what is called marsh migration.
This natural adaptation only works if the salt marsh has a place to go,
says Lora Clarke, a Charleston-based coastal ecologist at the Pew
Charitable Trusts. The five states that will potentially undergo the most
extensive marsh migration during this century are Louisiana, Florida,
North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina, which collectively account
for 82 percent of the nationwide land area where marsh migration
could occur, according to a June 2022 study in the journal Science
Advances.

New development along the coastline could block the movement of

plant life inland. “We need to make sure that we maintain those
undeveloped spaces that allow the marsh to migrate,” Clarke says. Pew
is working with the Gullah/Geechee Nation, the Coastal Conservation
League and a number of other organizations on the South Atlantic Salt
Marsh Initiative, a 15-year plan with the goal of conserving one million
acres of salt marsh in the Southeast.
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Just beyond the salt marsh, farther out in the ocean water, lies the
oyster reef habitat where clusters of dead and living shells fuse together
under the brackish tides. Harvesting oysters creates a stable form of
nourishment year-round for the Gullah Geechee, and the practice
became an important cash crop in the South after slavery as the
cultivation of cotton and indigo came to a halt. Preserving the Gullah’s
traditional harvesting methods has become increasingly important to
protect this source of income.

Bubba Green of Gullah Man Oyster and Seafood Company on Saint

Helena says that South Carolina oysters, a saltier variety of the
shellfish, have become so popular that they’re being overharvested.
This makes it harder for Gullah Geechee people to feed their families
with this still-important food staple. At one point in time, Green says,
nearby Bluffton, S.C.,, had as many as five oyster shucking houses. His
father, Bill Green, is a famous Gullah chef and owner of the well-known
Gullah Grub Restaurant on Saint Helena. I meet Bubba Green in his
family’s white clapboard restaurant, where father and son still work
together daily to cook up locally caught fried shrimp and oysters and
serve South Carolina Low-Country specialties such as oyster stew. The
two look almost like twins, with the same height and build and round
faces, wide grins and well-kept beards—only Bill’s beard is lightened by
flecks of gray.

Bubba Green has an encyclopedic knowledge of oysters: their biology,

breeding and susceptibility to a changing climate. “The oysters aren’t
there anymore, and when they are, they’re not being harvested the
right way,” he says. Traditional harvesting is being taken over with the
development of the land. Sustainable oyster reefs are built on the
premise of taking what is needed while also protecting the reef. “We
call it cull in place,” Green says. This means knocking the baby oysters
off of a cluster of the mollusks when you’re harvesting the adults so
that the babies can continue the cycle of life. “If you knock the foot [of
each oyster] off and take the whole cluster, you’re killing thousands of
baby oysters that will never grow into adults,” he says.
Oyster reefs aren’t just important for feeding the population. They’re
also crucial to coastal ecology. They shelter other prized marine species
such as blue crabs, flounder, perch and mackerel. And according
to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a single oyster
can filter more than 50 gallons of water a day. But perhaps the most
important reason for making reef preservation a priority is the oyster
bed’s role in providing storm protection. It slows down tidal incursions
and protects waterfront communities from the effects of storm surge
and flooding. Oyster reefs “dissipate wave energy” and act as barriers
to slow the force of storm surges along the coast, according to a June
2019 Nature study.
Strength in the face of adversity remains pivotal to the Gullah Geechee
way of life. “We have resiliency built into our DNA after surviving on
these lands for centuries,” Goodwine says. The community’s adamant
stance in holding out against developers and its protectiveness of salt
marshes and traditional fisheries will determine whether the barrier
islands remain intact.
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After our chat, I follow Goodwine and Atkins back to the parking lot
where Atkins shows me the bucket of eastern oysters he plucked from
the salt marsh that morning. He smiles over his fresh catch of shellfish
and ends our conversation with a resoluteness that gives hope that the
Gullah Geechee people may prevail in preserving their culture and the
islands. “A scientist can tell me what they think is going to happen, but
I know these waters better than they ever will,” he says.
*Editor’s Note (4/6/23): This sentence was edited after posting to
correct the description of Andrew Johnson becoming U.S. president
after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

A New Map Tracks

the World’s Largest
Glaciers
A visualization compares the forms of Earth’s largest

flows of ice
• By Theo Nicitopoulos, Amanda Montañez on January 1, 2023

•
•
•
•
 •
•

Credit: Am anda Montañez

Scientists recently created the first systematic ranking of Earth’s

largest glaciers. They started by comparing inconsistent databases to
select the forms that best fit the definition of a glacier—a long-lasting,
flowing mass of ice. Determining the borders of individual glaciers,
however, is challenging. Ice caps, for example, move in multiple
directions, so more than one glacier may be part of a single source.
“Flow divides can be difficult to calculate,” says co-author Bruce Raup
of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

At lower elevations, glaciers can converge, making it unclear whether

they count as one or more bodies. Despite the challenges, the results
tabulate more than 200,000 glaciers and glacier complexes (glaciers
that share a common border). Seller Glacier and the Antarctic
Peninsula Ice Body top the list, respectively. “The more accurately we
can map glacier outlines, the better we can track their melting due to
climate change,” says lead author Ann Windnagel of the NSIDC.
Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Which Glaciers Are the Largest in
the World?” by Ann Windnagel et al., in Journal of Glaciology; 2022 (glacier
shapes and map reference)
This article was originally published with the title "World's Largest
Glaciers" in Scientific American 328, 1, 62 (January 2023)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0123-62
Rights & Permissions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Theo Nicitopoulos is a freelance writer who covers Earth and space science news.

How amber creates exquisite

fossils
A warm-hued material prized by jewelry makers, amber takes more
than 40,000 years to form. See pictures of some of the finest
specimens.
BYMICHAEL GRESHKO

PUBLISHED APRIL 7, 2023

• 7 MIN READ

For many thousands of years, the fossilized tree resin known as

amber has entranced jewelry makers and inspired the scientific
imagination. For the past 200 years especially, paleontologists
around the world have turned to amber to understand the
ancient past—by studying the amazing fossils preserved within
it.

Have questions about amber? We’ve got you covered.

What is amber, and how do fossil inclusions end up

within it?
Plants secrete many kinds of viscous liquids, such as latexes,
gums, and waxes. Some kinds of plants, usually woody
plants, produce resins: complex, sticky substances that don’t
dissolve in water and harden when exposed to the air.

Resins serve to scab over plants’ wounds, making them sort of

like the platelets in our bloodstream. When a plant that makes
resin gets injured or otherwise has a break in its surface—such as
a crack running down a tree’s bark—resin oozes out of the area.
As the resin sits out in air and bakes in sunlight, it starts to
harden. This process forms a protective cover over the plant’s
wound, helping to keep out fungi and other pathogens.

Because resin is sticky, small creatures can get stuck in it as it

oozes over trees’ bark, drips onto the ground, or even flows out of
trees’ roots. On occasion, some of these globs end up in water:
perhaps because a tree happened to be growing on the shore of
an ocean or lake, or maybe because a flood swept the tree into a
river. Of these waterborne globs of resin, some end up buried
within sediment, such as the sand of a floodplain or the silt at the
bottom of a lake.

Hard tick grasping a dinosaur feather preserved in 99 million-year-old Burmese amber.

PHOTOGRAPH BY E. PEÑALVER VIA NATURE COMMUNICATIONS

The deeper the resin gets buried over many millennia, the more
pressure and heat the resin will end up feeling. Over an extended
period, these conditions cause the resin’s compounds to
polymerize, or chemically react with each other to form a thicket
of molecular linkages. This process yields the hard, glassy
material that we know as amber—and it also can preserve, with
extraordinary fidelity, the shapes of any small creatures trapped
within the amber.

How long does it take resin to form into amber?

It’s hard to say, exactly. Resin’s transformation into amber is
ultimately a product of the conditions that the blob of resin has
experienced. In general, though, amber is usually well more than
40,000 years old. Any younger than that, and the material has a
good chance of being classified as copal, an old, polymerizing
resin that still has some of the material properties of the fresh
material, such as a tackier surface.

What kinds of fossils have been found in amber?

Because amber can envelop and protect even soft-bodied
creatures, it’s great at preserving the tinier, squishier denizens
within forest ecosystems. Over nearly two centuries,
paleontologists studying amber have found insects, arachnids,
crabs, plants, fungi, nematodes, plants, microorganisms, and
even the occasional piece of a bigger vertebrate animal.
1/5

Underside of preserved tail section, displaying paler plumage, numerous decay

products
Underside of preserved tail section, displaying paler plumage, numerous decay products
PHOTOGRAPH BY R.C. MCKELLAR, ROYAL SASKATCHEWAN MUSEUM
But as you might imagine, the fossils that end up in amber are
skewed toward the creatures that would have had a higher
chance of getting entombed within an ancient tree’s resin.

Where are fossils in amber found?

There are more than 160 sites around the world where copal or
amber have been found, and the oldest amber on Earth—found in
an Illinois coal seam—is about 320 million years old. However,
these blebs of amber are less than a quarter of an inch wide on
average, and they don’t have any fossils inside them. Of Earth’s
total amber deposits, only a few dozen or so yield a wide array of
fossils. Nearly all of these fossil-bearing deposits are about 125
million years old and younger, with one known exception: a 230-
million-year-old amber deposit in the Italian Alps that
preserves a species of fly and two species of mite.
Cretapsara athanata: The first crab in amber from the dinosaur era.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LIDA XING

What are some of the best-studied amber deposits in

the world?
Baltic amber is usually estimated to be between 34 million and
38 million years old, though some deposits formed earlier. It
erodes out of sediments along the shore of northern Europe’s
Baltic Sea, with the best-studied deposits coming from what’s
now Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. More than 3,500 species of
fossil arthropods have been found in Baltic amber,
including more than 650 species of spider. Rarely, Baltic amber
yields vertebrate fossils—including a spectacular
gecko, named Yantarogekko balticus, dated to around 54 million
years old. It’s also yielded fossils of plants, including the biggest
known fossil of a flower preserved in amber.

Dominican amber is generally thought to be between 15 and

20 million years old, though its exact age is a matter of debate.
Scientists have found more than 1,000 fossil species within its
amber, including more than 400 species of insect and 150 species
of spider. Occasionally vertebrate fossils also pop up,
including anoles and even a salamander.

Burmese amber is about 99 million years old, and it comes

from mines in northern Myanmar’s Kachin state, which have
been exploited for the jewelry trade for roughly the past 2,000
years. Scientific interest in Burmese amber has surged over the
past two decades, as paleontologists have uncovered an
extremely diverse ecosystem: carnivorous “hell ants” entombed
mid-meal, the partial tail of a feathered dinosaur, the shell of a
marine creature known as an ammonite, and even an ancient
baby bird.

However, paleontologists are also hotly debating the ethics of

studying Burmese amber. Kachin’s amber mines have been at the
center of decades of conflict between Myanmar’s military and
local independence groups, and few recent scientific studies of
Burmese amber have included co-authors from Myanmar.

Canadian amber is between 78 million and 79 million years

old, and it primarily comes from a site called Grassy Lake in the
western province of Alberta. More than 130 different fossil
species have been found within amber here, many of which are
aphids or mites. But some pieces of amber include bits of conifer
needles, fungi, pollen, and even feathers from birds and other
dinosaurs.