Insects that coexisted with dinosaurs have been discovered in the Amazon.

An international team of scientists discovered a deposit of amber in the Ecuadorian Amazon containing perfectly preserved fossils of insects and plants dating back 112 million years, during the age of the dinosaurs. The discovery, made near the town of Archidona in Napo Province, constitutes the largest Cretaceous amber deposit found so far in South America.

The study was published in the prestigious journal Communications Earth & Environment and marks a milestone in the region's paleontology. According to the authors, this discovery opens a unique window into the past and allows for an understanding of what life was like in the ancient tropical region of Gondwana, the supercontinent to which South America belonged at that time.

The amber found in Ecuador is a fossilized resin that acted as a natural time capsule. Inside it, scientists found bioinclusions of insects such as wasps, flies, beetles, aphids, mosquitoes, and even fragments of a spider web. In the nearby sediments, fossilized remains of plants were also found, which help reconstruct the ecosystem of that era.

"The preservation of these external structures is so excellent that, under the microscope, they may look like freshly dead organisms, even though they are millions of years old," explained Xavier Delclòs, lead author of the study and researcher at the University of Barcelona.

The key to this exceptional preservation is that the hardened resin prevents contact with oxygen, which stops the decomposition of soft tissues and allows for the conservation of details that are not usually found in the traditional fossil record.

The majority of the world's most studied amber deposits come from the Northern Hemisphere. For this reason, this discovery greatly enriches knowledge about the biodiversity of the Southern Hemisphere during the Cretaceous.

"Finding a new site of this importance in the ancient continent of Gondwana provides very valuable information from a region where we previously had little data about the organisms that lived there," Delclòs emphasized.

Gondwana was a supercontinent that split into the current continents of South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Arabia, and India. This geological context makes the discovery an essential contribution to understanding how species evolved in this corner of the world.