This fieldwork was funded by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and by the Oxford NERC Environmental Science Doctoral Training Partnership. It was conducted under permit and with the support of the Sahtú Dene people.

Dr Ross was joined in Canada by DPhil student, George Wedlake, from @oxuniearthsci.bsky.social . They spent two weeks collecting over 100 rock samples which record an ancient tropical sea not unlike the Bahamas today, where early complex life likely flourished.

Museum Researcher @rosspanderson.bsky.social believes that finding rocks made up of antibacterial clay minerals holds the key. These minerals can slow the decay of organic cells long enough for them to survive as fossils.

The first complex organisms were microscopic and lacked such hard parts, like shells or skeletons. As a result, their soft and fragile cells rarely fossilised.

This is a septarian concretion with calcite filled fractures

Usually these solidified cracks are filled with crystallized minerals like quartz, but the minerals filling these cracks have washed away

The bear came from a rescue centre, before living out her life at the sanctuary she was kept as a pet. It was stipulated that when she died her remains were to be used for educational purposes, and now, here she stands.

Nom nom nom

All the scans, reconstructions, and 3D models will be made freely available in open repositories. That means anyone, from entomologists to curious hobbyists, could explore these ancient insects in digital space.

oumnh.ox.ac.uk/post?slug=am...

What emerges won’t just be pretty pictures. These models could rewrite parts of insect evolutionary history.

Each piece of amber will be scanned in full at a resolution fine enough to spot features a few micrometres across (a micrometre is one-thousandth of a millimetre — about one-hundredth the width of a human hair). 20 chosen specimens will then be magnified further still for an even sharper look.

Why does this matter? Well, these insects lived during the Early Eocene, around 53 million years ago, when flowering plants had taken over the world in what scientists call the Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution (ATR).

At SOLEIL, near Paris, a group of researchers led by OUMNH’s own Dr Corentin Jouault are preparing to shine one of the world’s brightest X-ray beams through over 100 blocks of Oise amber, each containing a fossilised insect no larger than a fingernail.

The most revealing details, like delicate mouthparts, are sealed away under the resin’s glossy surface. Cutting into them would destroy what makes them precious.

Enter the SOLEIL synchrotron.

Learn more here:

oumnh.ox.ac.uk/return-to-ox...